RWBYFam — RWBYFam: A Showcase
by sittscho
Summary: Introducing RWBYFam, a glimpse into what might have been if our beloved characters had lived around the time of Remnant's Great War. Expect fewer transforming weapons and a stronger touch of the supernatural as our heroes set out to go on action-packed adventures, get caught up in dastardly political schemes, or just hang out with their friends and deal with everyday life.
1. Front Matter

**RWBYFam**

 **A Showcase**

 _by sittscho_

* * *

Introducing RWBYFam, a glimpse into what might have been if our beloved characters had lived around the time of Remnant's Great War. Expect fewer transforming weapons and a stronger touch of the supernatural as our heroes set out to go on action-packed adventures, get caught up in dastardly political schemes, or just hang out with their friends and deal with everyday life.

 _RWBYFam: A Showcase_ is set in the RWBYFam universe, which is based on Rooster Teeth's _RWBY._ The _World of Remnant_ shorts, the _Valkyria Chronicles_ series of games, and history provided additional inspiration in creating the Remnant of yesteryear.

Over the course of this compilation of short stories, the following characters

\- Blake Belladonna  
\- Yang Xiao Long  
\- Ruby Rose  
\- Weiss Schnee

and pairings

\- Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long (Bumblebee, Bumbleby, Bmblb)  
\- Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee (White Rose, Ice Flower)

will be featured, among others.

As always, the material presented aims to stay true to the original while leaning toward the mundane and the lighthearted. Do not expect dark themes, heavy drama, or soap-operatic love triangles to run rampant.

* * *

 **Story Index**

 **Black**

Nature's assault on her was relentless, but she wouldn't budge. She had come too close, had sacrificed too much, to accept defeat. No, Blake would see this, her final mission, through no matter who or what would stand in her way.

Companion piece to _Yellow._

 **Yellow**

Take a journey down the rabbit hole of Yang's past and find out how she ended up buried in a frozen tomb at the end of the world.

Companion piece to _Black._

* * *

 **About the** ** _Showcase_** **Series**

The _Showcase_ series is meant to be a tool that allows the author to explore story ideas and concepts as they are being worked on without having to worry about lasting consequences or long-term commitments. At the same time, it gives the reader the chance to provide feedback during the formative stages of the creative process.

It is presented as a collection of short stories that live in the same general universe, albeit not necessarily in the same continuity, as each other and offers a glimpse at what might be expected from the finished product should it be picked up.

* * *

 **See Also**

 _RWBY_ by Rooster Teeth

\- _RWBY_ (en{.}wikipedia{.}org/wiki/RWBY)

 _RWBY Chibi_ by Rooster Teeth

\- _RWBY Chibi_ (en{.}wikipedia{.}org/wiki/RWBY_Chibi)

 ** _Valkyria Chronicles_** **by Sega**

\- _Valkyria Chronicles_ (wikipedia{.}org/wiki/Valkyria_Chronicles)

* * *

 **Contact Information**

New releases, updates, and revisions can be obtained _free of charge_ via

\- Archive of Our Own (archiveofourown{.}org/users/sittscho)  
\- FanFiction (www{.}fanfiction{.}net/u/6326698)

Status updates, progress reports, release notifications, behind-the-scenes information, and the odd request for contributions can be found on

\- Tumblr (sittschowrites) (sittschowrites{.}tumblr{.}com)  
\- Twitter (sittschowrites) (twitter{.}com/sittschowrites)

The author can be reached directly via

\- Twitter (sittscho) (twitter{.}com/sittscho)

Feel free to drop by, comment, review, and spread the word should you find yourself with some spare time to waste.

* * *

 **Revision History**

 **Revision 7 (2018-09-30)**

\- Update summary  
\- Update story index

 **Revision 6 (2018-03-18)**

\- Revise references

 **Revision 5 (2018-02-06)**

\- Update introduction to include main cast and pairings (roughly in order of relevance)

 **Revision 4 (2018-01-28)**

\- Revise front matter  
\- Update styling on FanFiction

 **Revision 3 (2018-01-24)**

\- Revise front matter

 **Revision 2 (2018-01-21)**

\- Add story _Yellow_  
\- Revise front matter  
\- Add story index

 **Revision 1 (2017-10-22)**

\- Release as _RWBYFam: A Showcase_  
\- Add story _Black_

* * *

 **Disclaimer**

All publicly recognizable characters, settings, plots, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any previously copyrighted material.

All original material is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (creativecommons{.}org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4{.}0).

Rated T (www{.}fictionratings{.}com).

Reader discretion is advised.


	2. Black

Nature's assault on her was relentless, but she wouldn't budge. She had come too close, had sacrificed too much, to accept defeat. No, Blake would see this, her final mission, through no matter who or what would stand in her way.

Companion piece to _Yellow._

* * *

 **Black**

In a land far, far away from anywhere a sensible person would ever dream of going, the rhythmic chinking of metal striking ice could be heard throughout a snow-covered mountain range. Chink, chink, chink; a quick break to catch a breath and check the progress; a sigh at the lack thereof; and yet another round of sturdy metal meeting an unyielding foe.

Blake had come to appreciate her trusty companion. She might even have admitted to being in love with it to no one in particular at times—dangling over several hundred feet of sheer nothingness with little else to stem the tide of gravity's pull could easily make a lonesome girl's frozen heart melt—but even that couldn't protect it from Blake's ire at their lack of progress.

Another swing of her ice ax left little more than a scratch on the frozen wall. Blake stifled a groan as the frustration welled up inside of her. She was close, so unbelievably close. She had to be. She could feel it. It had struck her like lightning the moment the cave had come into view. If it was a cave, that was. For all she knew, she might have been wasting her energy trying to excavate a solid rock wall. No, it had to be more than that. What little she could see through the almost opaque sheet of ice covering the mountainside looked like the rim of a cave entrance. It had to be.

Blake pressed her hands against the ice and tried to peer deeper into the blue-tinged void in front of her. Thick mittens numbed her sense of touch almost to the point of nonexistence, and yet, she could feel it. This was it. She wasn't delirious from the cold or from the lack of sustenance. Not quite yet anyway, though, by her own calculations she had passed the point of no return sometime over the last couple of hours. She might still have some leeway by rationing her meager reserves of food and fuel even more than she already had, but if she cut down on either much further, chances were she would be too weak to protect herself by the time she made it back below the tree line, back into grimm territory.

It was funny—or maybe it wasn't and the lack of oxygen high up in the mountains was affecting her more than she had thought it would—how even the grimm, the life-defying, monstrous nightmares that had plagued humans and faunus alike since time immemorial, wouldn't venture into the frozen hell Blake had found herself in.

And why would they? The grimm were drawn by the living, and if Blake had learned one thing since she had left behind the seemingly endless coniferous forests covering the lands below, it was that nothing living ever ventured into the snow-covered wasteland that touched the sky. There were no plants, no animals, not even insects buzzing around in her face. All there was, was ice, snow, and rocks. So many rocks under so much ice and snow…

If she ever saw a drink on the rocks again, it would be too soon. If she ever bought a house, it would be made of wood and filled with potted plants. It would be warm and humid and very, very green. Blue, gray, and white would be banished from the premises, and there would be central heating and a dust-powered fireplace in every single room. Or maybe she would just live in a tent on some tropical beach. She'd heard great things about the south of Vacuo.

A gust of biting-cold wind ambushed Blake, but it was no match for her instincts or her reflexes. She ducked into a small nook formed in the mountainside, masterfully dodging the army of snowflakes that had been sent her way in the process.

The warm feeling of triumph over her small victory against the elements quickly dissipated when her eyes fell onto the dark clouds looming in the sky above. She should have paid closer attention to the weather. Sudden gusts of wind had been almost constant and unpredictable companions ever since hills and trees had given way to cliffs and mountains, companions that had numbed her to the early warning signs of an incoming storm. Her nook would not protect her from a full-fledged blizzard nor was there any shelter in sight that wouldn't require hours of backtracking.

No, she couldn't risk that. She hadn't come within arm's reach of her prize to allow herself to get pinned down and trapped in some random cave by a freak storm, wondering if she would sooner freeze or starve to death while her provisions ran out. She had finally found what she had been looking for, what she had sacrificed years of her life for, and nothing, not the grimm or even nature itself, was going to stop her from seeing it through to the very end!

Blake pulled off one of her mittens with her teeth, leaving her hand wrapped in a thin woolen glove, and pulled a flare out of her backpack. Her last flare. She had come equipped with a few of them for emergencies, most of which she had dismantled in order to use their payload to thaw some drinking water or warm up some of her field rations in lieu of any remaining conventional fuel.

Once the wind had quieted down, she emerged from her nook and ripped the cap off the slightly dented cardboard tube. A violent array of sparks started to shoot out in an instant and, just as quickly, disappeared again into the meager divot left in the wall by her ice ax. The short blade of fire dug into their common enemy with an ease her trusty companion never could.

By the time the flare fizzled out in a column of black smoke, Blake had cut a hole, about the size of a small melon, as deep into the ice as her arm could reach. Without hesitation, she tossed the burnt-out husk off the mountain not wanting to dwell on the fact that she had just used up her last readily available source of warmth on an impulse and took stock of her work.

Despite cutting as deep as she possibly could, there was no end to the frozen obstruction in sight. That was not the result Blake had been hoping for, but at least she had confirmed that there was a cave opening hidden inside the ice and managed to widen the hole enough to deploy her secret weapon. Using it without knowing how deep the ice barring her from entrance went was a gamble she was not fond of taking, but, cornered by the storm, Blake had run out of other options.

With a sigh, she dove back into her nook thankful that the wind had granted her a small reprieve while she had been out in the open. Their understanding was temporary, however, as the dark clouds were closing in on her fast. With little time to waste, she took off her second mitten and carefully removed a tightly wrapped package from the bottom of her backpack.

She had taken a detour all the way to Mantle to acquire it, and many times since had she cursed herself for doing so. It was too heavy, it took up too much space, and it had been far too expensive. Not to mention that carrying it around was not only dangerous but highly illegal. Getting anywhere near restricted military technology on nothing but a hunch had not been one of the most sensible decisions Blake had ever made, but she had long since given up denying just how much she had come to rely on chance and good luck to make her expedition a success. Hunches and educated guesses seemed to have been doing her far more good than years of painstaking research and preparation.

A flash of light on the horizon, soon followed by rolling thunder, spurred Blake back into action. She carefully unwrapped the wooden box and opened the latches that had kept the lid tightly shut. Inside was another layer of cloth that, like the outer layer, had been impregnated with some sort of wax to keep the moisture out. Once untied, it revealed a bed of tightly packed straw used as a shock absorbent. Hidden within rested her secret weapon: a military-grade fire charge.

Blake's hands froze, her fingers hovering inches from the device. Only days before she had left civilization behind, a similar charge, quite possibly provided and modified by the same man she had hired to acquire hers, had been used in a vicious and entirely senseless attack on a public train terminal. Dozens of innocent people—humans and faunus alike—had spent their last moments in life covered in sticky burning goo, fully aware of what was happening to them, and it was her old mentor, her own faction of the White Fang, that had claimed credit for it.

What was she even thinking still following her mission? It had been half a decade since she had been chosen for it, chosen to acquire an artifact that was supposed to change the world for them. An artifact so powerful, it was said to have wiped out an entire town without a trace. With it in their possession, the world would finally have to listen to them, to take them seriously. It would allow them to negotiate from a position of influence and strength. They would never use it of course, just make the world believe that they could until even that was no longer necessary.

Back then, Blake had believed every word of it. She had been chosen, personally, by the man she had considered a hero of their people to change the future. She had been young and naive, reactionary and easily flattered, but that Blake was no more.

Years of chasing rumors and myths, of facing countless failures and dead ends, had convinced her that her mission was nothing but a fool's errand. She had tried to return to the White Fang numerous times, tried to get reassigned, to do something of use, only to be refused over and over again. It had made her angry, it had made her feel like she was wasting her life, but it had also been the best thing to ever happen to her. It had allowed her to break free from the self-affirming spiral of anger and hypocrisy that blinded the White Fang from seeing the damage they were causing to their own people, and it had saved her from their steady descent into senseless violence. She had been able to live a life she would never even have dreamed of living, and soon enough, she had found herself hoping never to be called back.

She hadn't expected it to last, of course. There had been too many lies, too many allegiances to juggle, for it not to end in tears, but out of all the possible culprits for her downfall, finding an actual lead on her original mission had caught her truly by surprise. Maybe she should have buried it an kept on pretending, but she hadn't been able to do that. The artifact had granted her a new life, and even if she had to sacrifice that present in the process, she knew that she had to find it. She had to solve the mystery and see it with her own eyes. She owed it to herself and the artifact to do that much…

* * *

 _The alley behind the old cannery. Midnight._

 _—Q_

That was how it all had started. It was how, or rather why, Blake had found herself worried, confused, readily armed, and quite nauseated in what might have been the single most dirty and disgusting corner of the capital of the Kingdom of Vale.

When she had first discovered the note on her windowsill, Blake hadn't thought too much of it. The messages sent by the White Fang rarely contained any names or more than a handful of words, and they had a way of showing up in unlikely and unexpected places. Access beyond their means was one of the merits of having the support of a people largely living in servitude.

Blake had been summoned to many a blind meeting over the years. It was the timing that had first raised her suspicions. Going undercover had freed her from any regular duties with the White Fang, while the lack of tangible progress on her mission had lead to a dwindling interest in her person in general. Her next contact hadn't been due for almost another month, which left only a select few reasons for her unscheduled evening out. She didn't like the sound of any of them.

Blake merged deeper into the shadows with a sigh. The only thing that bothered her more than the why was the where. The smell of garbage and any number of bodily fluids she would rather not identify was nauseating, but the stench of rotting fish coming from the old cannery behind the wall topped even that. Everything about the place was an affront to her senses, and no self-respecting faunus would ever have considered it for a meeting. Neither would they make her wait there for twenty minutes without showing their faces! Even if it was supposed to be an ambush, they should at least have had the decency to show up in time.

It was starting to feel more and more like she had fallen for some infantile prank that would be retold at Beacon for weeks to come…

 _"Did you guys hear? We got one over on the cat girl. We lured her to the cannery and had her standing in a cloud of rotten sardines all night. You can still smell her from the other side of the hallway whenever she turns a corner!"_

 _"Nah, it's fish. I bet she got a kick out of it."_

 _"Don't cats, like, rub themselves against stuff they like? She probably crawled all over the place to make it stick…"_

Blake rubbed the bridge of her nose before she checked the time, again. Whatever might have been supposed to happen, she was beyond caring, but just as she was about to leave, the flapping of wings stopped her in her tracks. She had seen all kinds of critters and vermin scurrying about in the dark while she had been waiting in the alley, but none of them had been airborne, and she would really rather not top off the night by getting jumped by a stray nevermore that might have found its way into the city.

With her hand resting on the hilt of her sword, she turned around and scanned the far end of the alley for any signs of the intruder. She couldn't find any, but it took her a moment to realize that the bird wasn't the only thing that seemed to have vanished into thin air. The alley had gone unnaturally quiet. The two stray cats that had been watching her since she had arrived had disappeared, and even the constant scurrying of rats in the garbage had ceased.

Blake furrowed her brows and drew her sword. She didn't know what, but something had changed the moment that bird had arrived. Not liking the idea of finding herself at a disadvantage against the unknown and cursing herself for not listening to her instincts telling her to watch the alley from a distance until her contact appeared, she carefully made her way towards the exit opposite to the one she had been watching.

"Quite perceptive, aren't you, kiddo?" an unfamiliar voice said from behind her.

To say that she wasn't caught by surprise would be lying, but Blake had survived her fair share of close encounters with her life on the line. She recovered fast and spun around with her weapon at the ready. What she came to face with wasn't quite the threat she had expected to find.

"A bit jumpy though," the man—a human in his thirties with disheveled hair and crumpled clothes—said with a gruff laugh that seemed to have been too much for his sense of balance. He staggered, barely catching himself against the wall with his free hand. The other was holding a silver flask of which he took a quick sip the moment the danger of falling over had passed.

Blake might have relaxed a bit given the situation, she might even have considered what she had experienced before a fluke or a trick of an overactive imagination, if it hadn't been for the sizable weapon the new arrival had strapped to his hips.

"Q, I presume."

He laughed again, though, a bit more jovial this time around. "You can call me Qrow. I was just trying to play the game your way."

Blake furrowed her brows in worry. If her cover was blown, things could get ugly fast.

"Right, Qrow then."

"Look, kiddo, there is no reason to glare at me like that. I mean, I was late, but there is a good reason for that. I was in that bar down 'round the corner, and, man, if you had seen the outfit on that waitress, you would have lost track of time too. I mean, talk about legs that go on forever!"

He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose as if he had noticed their surroundings for the first time. "What's with the smell?"

"It's a dirty alley in a rundown part of town behind a crumbling factory filled with old fish. What did you expect? Roses and cocoa butter?"

"Right," he laughed again. "Guess randomly choosing a bar—I mean, a dark corner to meet in wasn't the best way to go about things. Oh, well. I'll do better next time."

It took all the self-control Blake could muster not to jump the drunken idiot and strangle him. "Why am I here?" she asked through gritted teeth.

He smiled at her and took another sip from his flask before answering, "because you are surprisingly persistent, and you might just be what I've been looking for." He turned around the corner, motioning over his shoulder for Blake to follow.

The entire situation was just bizarre, and following him seemed like a terrible idea, but he had turned upwind of the cannery and it was as good a chance as any to finally get out of that alley. Besides, if he had planned to ambush her, he had just wasted the best chance he would get.

Blake sheathed her sword and hurried after Qrow who was waiting for her leaning against one of the nearby buildings. Once she had caught up with him, he walked off into the dark away from the crowd hanging around the bar down the street—a seemingly nameless place with a big neon sign of a bare leg in high heels kicking with every buzz. Guess it's a theme. Blake shook her head and followed the stranger, keeping her distance and her hand on her sword.

"You won't need that," Qrow said without looking back.

"We'll see about that," Blake countered, eliciting another gruff laugh.

"You are a cautious one. Good, you'll need that to survive if you want to go through with what you've started."

"And what would that be?"

Qrow looked over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow. "Shouldn't you know that? You've been looking for it ever since you've joined Beacon, probably even before that. Did look like you gave up there for a while, but you got back on the horse."

This was bad. It was what Blake had dreaded to have happen ever since she had started her mission and infiltrated Beacon. Someone had been bound to find out and blow her cover eventually. If anything, she was surprised that she had gotten away with it for as long as she had, but it was still too soon. She had finally found a real lead, and if she lost access to Beacon's resources now, she might lose the chance to follow it for good.

"Again with the glaring," Qrow said with a sigh. "Relax, kiddo. I'm not your enemy. If anything, I might be able to give you a hand."

"Why would I believe that?"

"Well, for starters, if I wanted you gone, I could have ratted you out years ago, but I couldn't do that to old Barty now, could I?"

"Professor Oobleck? What does he have to do with any of this?"

"He's damn well unbearable when he's gushing over you, that's what he's got to do with this. Can't you just imagine how much more annoying he would be to deal with if I was the one who had gotten his favorite student kicked out?" Qrow scoffed. "I'd never hear the end of that."

Favorite student? Caught between pride and confusion, all Blake could muster was a meek, "I don't understand…"

"Seriously? You've never caught the guy boring people to death with how much he loved some essay about some crap nobody gives a shit about you've written?" Qrow took a big gulp from his flask. "It's always the firstborn that makes life a pain in the ass for everyone else!"

Blake furrowed her brows. "You make it sound like he's my father."

"He might as well be. The only thing missing are the baby pictures in his wallet. It's disgusting."

Blake didn't have the time to process the fact that her favorite professor might think of her as family. Not when her blood was boiling over the drunkard's bigotry. "Why? Because I'm faunus?" she snarled.

Qrow stopped and faced her with an unreadable expression. "You should do something about that chip on your shoulder." He waved dismissively as he walked on. "There are only two things a man should be gushing about: a good drink and a good woman. In that order. The proud-dad-on-a-caffeine-high shtick makes me want to punch his lights out every time I see him."

Blake wasn't exactly happy with the direction the conversation had taken nor was she sure she had fully processed it yet, but she decided to drop it for the time being. "You've been spying on me, and you got annoyed by my very existence. I'm not going to apologize for that, and I don't see how any of this brings the two of us here."

"Apologize?" Qrow asked with a laugh. "Far from it. I get the feeling that I might have to thank the great whatever for it one of these days. Hell, she might actually like you."

"She?"

"What? Oh, nothing. Just the ramblings of a drunken old man. You probably shouldn't try to read anything into it."

Blake eyed him suspiciously. "Right."

Qrow held up his flask, glared at it like he was caught in some contest of will with the silvery object, and screwed it shut with a sigh. "We are here because we are in the fortunate position to do each other a favor."

"I'm listening." That much wouldn't hurt.

"You know, there were others before you. Some were just as committed as you've been, some even made it almost as far as you have, but none of them felt right."

"Right for what?"

"Later. First, tell me how it's going. It doesn't seem like you've made much progress since your recent breakthrough."

"You expect me to believe that you don't already know the answer to that question?"

"Fair enough. How about this then: Why have you stopped keeping your other employer up to date? Decided to keep the prize for yourself now that you're close?"

Blake stopped in her tracks. All the hairs on her neck were standing up and her hand had found its way back to her sword. "Who are you?"

"Name's Qrow, but we've been through that already," he said with a casual smirk that did little to calm Blake's nerves. "And no, I'm not here to kill you and retrieve your research for your furry buddies or anything like that. They couldn't afford my services."

"A mercenary," Blake said, gripping her sword with enough force to make her knuckles turn white.

"Technically, though, these days, Oz pays me well enough not to bother with branching out."

"So Beacon has finally found out and is cracking down on me. They're probably going through my room and my office as we speak while you keep me away or make me disappear."

"Cautious might be an understatement," Qrow said with a laugh. "That's some full-blown paranoia you've got going there, kiddo."

Blake drew her sword, ready for whatever might come next, but Qrow only raised his hands in surrender. "I told you before, you won't need that thing. I'm not here to hurt you."

She was not deterred and pointed her sword at the man. "Talk."

Qrow rolled his eyes in annoyance but kept his arms raised. "My interest in what you're looking for is of a personal nature. Beacon has nothing to do with it. The White Fang has nothing to do with it. My family has. The artifact, or whatever it's called nowadays, is our responsibility—my responsibility. That's why I've been watching you, just like I've been watching everyone else who has been trying to find it for a long time now."

Blake lowered her sword and Qrow's arms followed. "You know what it is?"

"I know what it is, I know why it was hidden from the world, and I know that you've hit a wall you won't be able to overcome without what I have to offer."

"Right. Let's say I believe you, what then? You want to team up and get your cut? Pool resources and hold hands while we head out and find the artifact together?"

"No, I've tried to get involved before." He sighed and continued with his eyes staring into the distance unfocused. "I've tried to do the right thing, to make things better, I've even tried to take Raven's place when she refused to take responsibility, but I've only ever made things worse." He looked Blake in the eye. "Tell me why you've stopped reporting your _real_ progress to the White Fang."

Blake closed her eyes and took a deep breath. There was something about the sudden sincerity and longing in his voice that spurred her to make a leap of faith. "Because I'm not sure it's the right thing to do anymore. I believed in the cause. I still do. I believe that the faunus deserve to be treated as equals, but I'm not sure _they_ do. Not anymore, maybe not ever. I don't know if it was me or them that changed, or if I've just come to see them for what they truly are, but I can't blindly hand over whatever it is they sent me to look for without knowing what damage it could cause in the wrong hands.

"I need to see this through without their interference, without their agenda looming over everything I do. And I need to know what all the secrecy is about, where breadcrumbs I've been following for the last five years lead. I need to see, for myself, what lies at the end of it all. Only then can I make a decision about what to do and whom to trust, if anyone at all."

Qrow reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a nondescript brown envelope. "You know, if you make it back in one piece, you really should consider giving the old bean lover one of those insipid '#1 Dad' mugs." He tossed over the envelope. "He did well by you, kiddo."

Blake found herself distracted by the message scribbled on the envelope. It reminded her of the off-handed comment Qrow had made earlier, but just as she was about to grill him about it, the flutter of wings echoed through the night once again. She didn't have to search her surroundings to know that there was no point in asking anymore.

Her attention returned to the message written in a now familiar script:

 _Bring her home…_

* * *

She had smelled of fish for days and heard just about every variation of cat-and-fish jokes imaginable, but the lingering smell wasn't the most infuriating thing she had been left to deal with after that night. No, that honor belonged to the contents of the envelope, the bulk of which had turned out to be a series of nonsensical scribbles that contained directions to obscure landmarks virtually impossible to locate. It had taken Blake months to decipher them all, and only after she had figured out that the small scrap of torn paper that had been stuck to the inside of the envelope was a piece of an ancient map—one of a kind and buried so deep in the archives of Beacon that nobody had even known it existed—had she been able to put it all together.

She hadn't seen the infuriating drunkard again, nor had she told anyone about their meeting or that she was about to leave on a journey she might well not return from, but now that she had finally reached her destination, none of it seemed to matter anymore.

She primed the timer on her secret weapon and pushed it as far into the hole she had prepared as she could. Unlike the fire charge that had been used in the recent bombing, this one had been modified to burn slowly, turning it into a very potent space heater that should be able to melt any amount of ice standing between her and the cumulation of five years of her life.

Taking one last deep breath, she activated the timer, giving herself a window of thirty seconds to get out of the way. She dashed back to her nook, less worried about escaping the inferno she had just scheduled to be unleashed and more about the bone-chilling wind that had become a constant nuisance now that the storm was almost upon her.

Temporarily safe from the elements, both natural and man-made, she reached inside of her jacket and pulled out the last item she had found in the envelope: a piece of singed fabric, scarlet red with a yellow heart wrapped in flames drawn on it. She never had figured out its meaning. There was no obvious link to the rest of the envelope's contents, nor had she been able to find any references to it in the vast archives she had access to at Beacon. And yet, without knowing how or why, she could tell that it was important.

Ever since it had fallen into her lap, she had kept it close to her heart. It felt like the right place for it to be, it felt like that was where it was meant to be, and whenever the stress and frustration of her quest had threatened to overwhelm her, she had pulled it out to feel the soft fabric between her fingertips. Knowing that it was close by, being able to touch it, had never failed to instill a sense of peace and tranquility in her, which was why Blake, despite the merciless assault of the cold, had decided not to don her thick mittens again as she waited for her secret weapon to do its work. It wasn't quite the same as touching the heart directly, but she could almost feel the warmth of the stylized flames through her thin woolen gloves.

What sounded like a sparkler found on a birthday cake signaled the lighting of the fuse. Even to Blake's sensible ears it was barely audible over the howling of the wind, which explained why it took her a moment to realize that it had only burnt for a couple of seconds before it had fizzled out without causing any followup.

She continued to listen for any signs of a raging fire as she wondered what to do. The last thing she needed was to be stranded thousands of miles from the nearest blast- and fire-proof suit while the custom modifications applied to a vicious bomb by a rather untrustworthy arms dealer turned out to be a dud or, worse, just looked like one for long enough to lure her out of cover.

She counted out five seconds in her head, then ten, then fifteen. Nothing happened. With a sigh, she leaned back in her safe but no longer very wind-proof nook and tried to remember all the instructions she had been given on handling the fire charge. She was certain that it was supposed to ignite within moments after the fuse had been lit by the timer. That was the whole point of the timer: make sure that the operator wouldn't go up in flames when activating the stupid thing.

Had it been twenty seconds or thirty now? Whichever it might have been, Blake was pretty sure that nothing was going to happen anytime soon. She should have brought a gun so she could just shoot it until it went up in flames. Or a backup fuse. Or another flare she could have chucked into the hole. But no. After weeks of preparation, months of deciphering the annoying ramblings of some infuriating drunkard, and years of chasing fairy tales and urban legends, this was how it was going to end? Foiled by an equipment malfunction?

No, that was not going to happen. She still had some of the fire-dust jelly she had been using as tinder around. There had to be some way to fashion it into a makeshift fuse even if she had to crack that sphere open like an egg and light it by hand!

Blake reached for her backpack, but before she could rummage through its contents, a muffled explosion shook the mountainside, showering her in loosened snow. She recovered quickly from the surprise and found herself staring at a burning blob of gel that was slowly sinking into the snow in front of her.

It blew up! First it did nothing, then it blew up! That was the very thing that was not supposed to happen after the modifications she had paid an unreasonable amount of money for. Oh, once she made it back to Mantle, that shifty guy with his combed-back head of grease would be in some much trouble!

With a sigh, she pushed herself up and slowly made her way to ground zero while holding her backpack up and ready to deflect any further burning blobs getting flung her way by random explosions. The damage wasn't as severe as Blake had expected. The ice was cracked in places, and, rather than acting as a concentrated source of heat, the fire charge seemed to have distributed its payload throughout the cracks, illuminating the entire wall in an eerily beautiful orange.

She shook her head and returned to her nook as the war between fire and ice raged beyond her control. At least the charge had caught fire in the end, but with the gel freed from its container, she wouldn't be able to move it should the ice reach deeper than the flames were able to.

Blake leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the sound of fiery progress over the howling winds. All she could do was wait and hope that it would be enough…

* * *

With an undignified grunt, Blake ended up sprawled out on the floor. She barely had the time to close her eyes and try to protect her face before a cloud of dust engulfed her and sent her into a coughing fit. Waving her hand in front of her in an attempt to disperse the remainders of dust in the air, she eventually managed to get herself back under control.

Luckily, the opening in the cave-in she had just crawled through would still be large enough for a second pass on the way out, but the only thing that had saved her from getting bludgeoned and squished to death by a wide assortment of jagged rocks had been a split second activation of her semblance pushing her the rest of the way through.

But she had finally done it, or so she hoped. Blake had been ecstatic before when it had turned out that her improvised space heater, despite misfiring and exploding, had done its job by eating its way all the way through the ice blocking the entrance. The feeling hadn't lasted for long though. Only a couple of yards in, she had been greeted by something almost as devastating as another wall of ice: a giant pile of rocks.

The discovery, while problematic, had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. She wouldn't have had the resources to deal with another icy barrier, nor would she have been able to excavate a cave-in blocking her way without heading back down the mountains and stocking up on rations and firewood first. Rather than a natural cave-in full of loose material though, what Blake had come across was undoubtedly man-made. Someone—using rather out-of-date explosives if the powder marks along the walls and floor were anything to go by—had tried to seal the entrance by blowing a large chunk of rock out of the ceiling.

At first glance, they had succeeded, but there had been enough wriggle room left for someone as nimble as Blake to squeeze through, albeit not without some difficulties. She had to leave her backpack and most of her equipment behind in order to pass through the opening and still almost caused it to collapse on top of herself. She could really do with finding an alternate exit on the way out, but something told her that she wouldn't be so lucky.

Safe for the moment and having finally caught her breath, Blake managed to take stock of her surroundings. The powder marks on the inside of the cave-in were extremely well preserved. Aside from a slight covering of dust, there wasn't the slightest hint of a disturbance marring the layer of soot. She had finally reached the elusive vault no human or faunus had set foot in for almost two decades.

In front of her, a winding tunnel faded into the darkness. Very little of the slowly dwindling daylight was making it through what remained of the opening in the cave-in, and what little of it there was would soon be cut off by the curvature of the tunnel. Light was going to be an issue even with Blake's highly sensitive eyes.

Good thing that she had grabbed her flashlight and a spare set of batteries from her backpack before crossing over even if the unwieldy hunk of metal getting stuck on a rock and painfully digging into her side had been the main culprit for almost getting her crushed and buried. It certainly hadn't been any clumsiness or carelessness on her part that had almost gotten her killed.

With a loud click, she turned on the flashlight and failed to be impressed. As it turned out, frozen caves at the end of the world had little respect for the battery's range of operating temperatures. What used to be a crisp, blinding beam of light felt more like the ambient mood lighting of a certain leg-focused bar. Well, it would have to do. Her eyes certainly had been good enough for her to figure out that there was not a single waitress in that bar with legs long enough to justify making her wait for half an hour in that alley.

Not wanting to waste any more time—a luxury of which she was dangerously close to running out of—Blake ventured deeper inside. There seemed to be only one way to go: a tunnel made of rough gray stone partially covered in a dusting of what almost looked like freezer burn. In some places, cracks had formed in the rock that had allowed water to seep through, leading to the formation of all manners of alien-looking but surprisingly beautiful ice sculptures.

As she ventured on, Blake kept a look out for any signs of traps that might have been left behind, but aside from the occasional sheet of ice trying to make her slip and fall, there was nothing to be found that would impede her progress.

Eventually, far deeper into the mountain than she had expected to go, the tunnel started to flare out and opened up into a vast cavern filled with a veritable forest of thick columns of ice, standing dense enough to shield whatever might be hidden within from view.

As Blake shone her light through them, she was struck by the otherworldly beauty of the scenery in front of her as the translucent columns lit up in a deep blue reminding her of the ocean. Something about them was off though. There were no rough patches, no cracks, no splinters or sharp edges, no impurities like she had seen all throughout the cave outside of the cavern. Everything, even the ice coating the walls and the floor, was uniform, solid, and smooth.

There was no mistaking it. The interior of the cavern had been shaped deliberately, and at great effort and cost. Blake had finally found signs of civilization. She had finally found her vault!

* * *

A small cloud of mist formed and dissipated in front of Blake. One of hundreds, maybe even thousands, she had called to life only to watch them die again in the freezing cold. She hadn't managed to keep track of the time it had taken her to make a full lap around the cavern nor of its true dimensions. Something about the place just made her senses feel off, made it feel unnatural and wrong. She couldn't put her finger on it, maybe she was just imagining it all, but she did not like being there.

As much as her instincts were screaming at her to run and cut her losses while she still had the chance, she felt undeniably drawn to the center, which had yet to reveal itself to her from within the dense forest of ice. At no point had she been able to catch a glimpse inside, but now and then, when the irregular shape of the cavern had forced her to venture closer, she had felt a curious warmth in her chest. It was ridiculous, of course. After all, whenever she had become aware of it, it would disappear again, leaving only a vague memory behind that might have been nothing more than a figment of her imagination. Once she had even thought it had come from the talisman she had kept in her breast pocket, but when she had pulled out the piece of fabric, it had been no different than the day it had found its way into her possession.

No, the cavern was playing tricks on her mind. Maybe it was another layer of security installed to keep the vault safe or just the strain of the last couple of days catching up with her, but she couldn't shake the feeling that none of her senses had been as reliable as she was used to ever since she had set foot into the vault. And it was indeed the vault. Between some almost perfectly preserved wooden furniture, a frozen-over fire pit, a makeshift barracks for about a half a dozen people, and no other entrances or exists to the cavern she'd been able to find, there was no doubt on her mind that she had reached the end of her journey.

Blake turned her back to the entrance and took a deep breath in an attempt to try and smother those pesky alarm bells ringing up a storm in the back of her mind. There was only one thing left to do and no matter how much every fiber of her body told her not to, she was not going to leave without venturing into the center.

Flashlight in one heavy mitten, sword in the other, Blake took the plunge and made her way towards the nearest column. She rounded it, picked out the next-closest column towards the center, crossed the gap in as quick a dash as the slippery ground would allow for, and continued the pattern, trying to keep a solid chunk of ice guarding her blind spot at all times.

She hadn't come across any signs of life, not recent ones anyway, but there were ways to create guardians that could withstand both time and the cold indefinitely. Someone could even have captured and trapped grimm for the job, though, the remote location made that a very unlikely choice. Still, she was too close to her prize and too far from any sort of medical aid to take unnecessary risks.

Only a handful of columns in, she realized that she was starting to lose her way. Sight of the outside had been cut off, and there was no snow or dirt on the ground to mark her footsteps. The only things visible in whatever direction she looked in were more columns of ice, and while finding her way out should be an easy enough task as long as she could manage to traverse the forest in a straight line, just blindly crisscrossing the cavern wasn't going to do her much good. Marking the columns as she passed them seemed like the obvious solution to keeping track of her path, but they put up a surprising amount of resistance. Even while pouring some of her aura into the edge of her sword, it took some real force, and more noise than she was comfortable with, to leave a mark.

Still, Blake was making good headway all things considered. She was closing in on the point she had estimated to be the center of the cavern, though, where exactly that might be was not as clear-cut as she liked to believe. Not only had she failed to get a reliable estimate of the dimensions of the vault itself, but with her line of sight barely ever extending beyond a few yards, judging distances had turned out to be just as difficult as staying on course.

She was just about to dash across another gap when she froze in her tracks halfway in between two columns. A weird sensation, like a tug on her aura, was washing over her. It felt wrong, almost violating, but it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared the moment she took a step back. Caught somewhere between the euphoria of getting close, very close, and another flare-up of the almost overwhelming desire to run, Blake froze in place, waiting for something, anything, to happen.

Nothing did. Whatever she had come across, it wasn't some trap about to bring the ceiling down on her head or drown her in ice-cold water. She stretched her arm out in front of her, and, like crossing an invisible barrier, the tugging sensation returned.

Blake took a moment to ponder the situation. She had never come across anything like it, but there were no alarms going off or monsters headed her way, and whatever the exact purpose of the barrier seemed to be, she couldn't feel anything but a mild discomfort from it as it slowly siphoned off her aura. Well, she should be fine as long as her aura wouldn't run out, and turning back simply wasn't an option anymore.

She marked the invisible line in the ground with her sword, braced herself, and moved on. The sensation was distracting, but Blake had dealt with worse. She rounded another column, marked it dutifully, and made a dash over the gap as she had many times before. And just like with the last gap, the moment she crossed the halfway point, she could feel the tug on her aura increase.

Blake frowned. Another barrier, and the time limit she had to contend with had just gotten a lot tighter. Not wanting to waste any of it, she was about to move on when she noticed a strange discoloration on the ground. It was faint, barely distinguishable from the ice itself, but there was no mistaking it. Trapped below the ice, or maybe within it, were markings laying out a circular band containing a string of symbols—some sort of runes or glyphs. Unfortunately, Blake couldn't place or decipher them off the top of her head, nor had she the time to stick around and copy them down for further study, not while her aura was steadily draining away in a hostile environment.

With a sigh of defeat and another entry on the growing list of topics to read up on for future reference should she ever be allowed back into one of Beacon's libraries, she moved on, trading caution and stealth for a quicker progress. There was another circle after the next column, and another one after that, and with each circle she crossed, they become easier to make out but more demanding on her aura. It was starting to feel like something, or someone, was reaching for her very soul and trying to rip it out of her body.

And then it just stopped. The moment she had crossed the last circle—the lettering had darkened into a bold midnight blue at this point—the sickening pull had just disappeared only to be replaced by a sense of emptiness. It was unsettling, very, very unsettling, and it took Blake a moment to figure out why: she could no longer feel her aura. She tried to draw upon it, focus it into her blade as she had done countless times before, but nothing happened. The second attempt failed just like the first and left her feeling naked and unarmed. True, she still had her sword, but it had been many years since she had found herself in a dangerous situation without being able to rely on her aura.

Blake stepped back out of the circle, and just like with the ones before, the effect was instantaneous. As the soothing presence of her aura returned, so did the pull on it. She took a deep breath and followed one of the first concentration exercises anyone learning to hone their aura would be taught. She tried to visualized it, and there they were, the familiar black shadows, her constant companions, coursing all throughout her body. They weren't as full or as lively as they would have been after a good rest, but they seemed to be in perfect order. There was an obvious pull towards the barrier though, and the occasional flicker that was swept away would dissolve into an ethereal mist the moment it crossed over.

Having gotten a good idea what was going on—though absolutely none on how it was achieved—Blake extended her hand into the barrier and watched the ethereal mist rise from it like bands of steam from hot water. This was worse than she had expected. Not only was the next barrier cutting her off from her aura, it would continue to drain it without giving her any chance of keeping track of what was left. Even if she tried to come up with an estimate on how long she could safely linger, the moment she crossed any more barriers, she would be flying completely blind.

Blake tightened the grip on her sword, her only line of defense left, and made up her mind. She had come too far to leave because she was worried about something she didn't even know for sure would be dangerous. For all she knew, nothing would happen once her aura was drained, and losing one's aura did not erase years of experience and training. She might be handicapped without it, but she would be far from helpless.

After crossing the midnight-blue barrier once more, Blake took a moment to center herself and get used to the feeling of loss. Now that she had been prepared for it, it felt less unsettling and more just strange. Everything felt slightly off. Her senses felt muffled, her body felt numb, and the cold was seeping into her bones with renewed vigor. She clamped her jaw shut to stop her teeth from chattering, and moved on as quickly as the slippery ground allowed.

Much to her surprise, there were no more barriers obstructing her path, and after crossing several more clearings, the space in front of her started to open up. This had to be it. She had finally found the center of the vault!

With a rush of adrenaline and an involuntary smile on her lips, Blake, aware of every single step, followed the curvature of the last column blocking her way. She had slowed down almost to a crawl, trying to draw out the grand reveal as much as she could despite the assault of the biting cold weighing heavily on her.

It wasn't a fluke or an irregularity in the pattern of the icy forest. With every step, she could see the space in front of her opening up more and more. Line of sight with the center was only moments away. Two more steps, maybe three. She was so close when she noticed something in the corner of her eyes that made her blood freeze in her veins in a way the cold never could.

There was one last circle etched into the ground, but it was nothing like the others had been. A deep crimson script marred a band of a discolored white which was framed on both sides by black shadowy tendrils that were reaching out into the ice as if trying to corrupt it.

Blake went into a defensive stance with her back against the column and frantically searched her surroundings for any signs of movement. She had discounted the grimm as guardians early on, but the imagery of what her mind had dubbed the grimm circle made her revisit the idea. She waited, and listened, and waited some more. There were no signs of life or movement aside from herself, and if the grimm still hadn't found her after the eclectic mix of emotions she must have projected ever since entering the cavern, there probably weren't any around in the first place.

She almost wanted to laugh at herself. This stupid vault was wearing down her nerves and had her jump out of her skin at every turn. She needed to calm down and stop running around like headless chicken.

After a deep breath to calm herself, she took another look at the grimm circle. The color scheme was clearly meant to evoke its namesakes, and the craftsmanship was impressive. At a glance, the shadows lining the circle had looked real, almost as if they were moving, but they were nothing but a static part of the design. The writing, however, had Blake worried. She turned off her flashlight, and, as she had feared, it lit up in same eerie red glow seen in the eyes of the grimm.

She turned her light back on and let her head fall against the column of ice behind her. At this point, she couldn't tell anymore if she was looking at an elaborate prank or a genuine warning of danger. She really wished she'd had the foresight and the patience to read up on this barrier nonsense before she had set out on her expedition. Or at least expanded her knowledge of ancient glyphs and runes. She was a member of the history department, for crying out loud, and right now she would settle for just getting a hint on what that fancy floor decoration might do to her if she stepped on it so she could brace herself.

Well, whatever it would be, it couldn't be worse than the real deal. She had faced down an entire continent teaming with grimm, many bigger and more dangerous than any she had encountered before, and she had made it out on top. She wouldn't cave in to a few threatening scribbles on the ground.

Blake made sure that the grip on her sword was still sound and secure, just in case, and, making sure to keep a reasonable distance from the grimm circle, stepped into the clearing in order to finally catch a glimpse of what it had all been about.

It was nothing like what she had expected. Blake swept her flashlight over the center, back and forth, not trusting the image her eyes had produced from the weak indirect illumination, but there was no doubt about what she was seeing. At the very center of the grimm circle wasn't a pedestal holding some sort of golden artifact of ancient origin she would have to wrestle free by replacing it with an equal weight in order to not get killed by some dastardly and inexplicably still working trap but a body, sprawled out on the naked floor.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage her big moment it, Blake did another sweep over the center with her flashlight. She even turned it off and on again, but the only thing that had achieved was a rather impressive, if disturbing, view of the full grimm circle lighting up in the dark.

Blake felt confused and lost. Clearly, there was no artifact powerful enough to destroy an entire town to be found. She had spent five years of her life chasing a myth everybody but some drunkard in a dark alley had told her wasn't real, and she had gotten exactly what it was worth: nothing.

That would have been how the story ended if all she had found was a body in a random cave while taking a hike through the local mountainside. But this wasn't just a random cave in her backyard, it was an elaborate vault, no, a tomb created by someone in a virtually inaccessible mountain range on an uninhabited continent teaming with grimm.

Filled with renewed vigor, Blake shuffled as close to the grimm circle as she could without crossing it and let her eyes roam over the body. Most of it looked no different than any other ice mummy she had come across in various museums. Dark and leathery skin was strapped tightly over its bones, which were clearly visible sticking out all over the place. Some scraps of disintegrating fabric where still clinging to its hips, though, whatever they might have been once, they hardly seemed adequate for the cold.

It was the hair that gave Blake pause. Almost like a shaggy blanket, a massive golden mane covered most of the body. Now, if Blake remembered one thing about the hair on the mummies she had seen, it was that, if there was any left at all, it tended to look rather mangy and sickly. What it most certainly never had looked like, was a silky sea of golden locks that almost seemed to glow in the dark. Or maybe that was just a trick of the eyes caused by the ice crystals that clung to it and shimmered like stars in the night?

Blake shook her head. Mummified bodies did not have hair that would make a shampoo-commercial model jealous. And people didn't cross thousands of miles of oceans, mountains, and grimm territory to set up elaborate hidden tombs at enormous costs just to bury someone, no matter how loved or feared they might have been.

Something was very wrong about what she had found. A lot of things were wrong about it, if Blake was to be honest with herself, but there was some crucial detail she was missing. Even if it was supposed to a prison, why go through all this trouble to—wait! Blake's attention snapped back to the body, tracing the outline of the hair where it was hiding most of the torso. There it was. Just a glimpse of single link caught in the light where the excessive mane had parted slightly, but there was no mistaking it. A chain. A very heavy metal chain.

It wasn't a vault or even a tomb. It was prison! A prison that had turned into a tomb…

"Bring her home," Blake said out loud, doing her worst imitation of a gruff drunken slur.

Yeah, she might be a bit late for that. About two decades late, give or take, as there were no signs of food or shelter from the cold anywhere near the body.

That infuriating drunkard had to have know that this would be what she would find. So what had she been expected to do exactly? Toss a mummy over her shoulder and carry it all the way back home? And who came up with this brain-dead idea anyway? Build a giant, elaborate prison at the end of the world to bury someone without any of the things they would need to survive trapped in a giant freezer. Yeah, that makes total sense! Why not just bury them somewhere closer to home, somewhere that didn't include crossing an ocean and hundreds of miles of grimm territory? Or just kill them outright? Capital punishment might be barbaric, but it had to have been a better way to handle things than going through all this trouble just to have somebody freeze and starve to death.

Blake realized too late that she had started pacing back and forth in tune with the frustrated and angry rant in her head. In fact, she hadn't realized at all until the sound of metal scraping against metal had made her jump and freeze like a deer caught in the headlights. Or, more adequately, like a cat caught in the dark.

There was no way she had just completely lost her head and accidentally crossed some vicious-looking barrier modeled after the grimm without noticing. And there was no way she had just heard signs of life in a cavern devoid of anything but ice, rock, and a dead body. And there was absolutely no way in hell that someone as experienced and combat hardened as Blake had just jumped like a frightened little girl, dropping both her weapon and her only source of light in the process.

No, there was absolutely no way that any of that had just happened. Only, the eerie red glow of the grimm circle—just about the only thing she could see as her eyes were trying to get accustomed to the sudden darkness—was suspiciously curving in the wrong way. A very strong, if unfortunate, indication that none of the above had been just a figment of her imagination. Or almost none of the above because one of those things was clearly impossible. Ghosts, zombies, or the undead in general—especially mummies—did not exist. Nobody over the age of ten, or maybe even closer to five, believed in that sort of nonsense, which clearly proved that the very first item on the list couldn't have happened. Just as she most certainly hadn't just heard that very same sound of metal scraping against metal again because that was, as previously established, impossible.

In her mind, Blake's view of world was going strong. She was not afraid of ghosts haunting her or groaning reanimated bodies trying to eat her brains because those things were nothing but stories—fairy tales—told to little children to scare them. Fairy tales and myths, like the one she had followed all over the world for the past five years in order to find a body that was most definitely not moving!

She clamped her eyes shut with as much force as she could muster, blocking the eerie red glow in the floor, the only visible reminder of her predicament, from her view and finally dared to take a breath. She wasn't sure how long she had abstained from taking in any air, but she had reached her limit somewhere along the line. Supplying her starving brain with some oxygen helped calm her down and derail the childish train of denial she had been riding on.

More clanking of chains, the rustling of something unidentifiable, and an almost inaudible groan of pain left no doubt about it. She was no longer alone in this icy tomb. Or maybe she never had been?

Blake took another deep breath and tried to prepare herself mentally to face one of her biggest childhood fears. She was, of course, well aware of the ridiculousness of delaying the assessment of a potentially brain-eating threat sneaking up on her from behind for something as inconsequential to the situation as a bit of peace of mind, but it was a rather extraordinary situation that demanded the proper level of preparation before it could be tackled. After all, facing a flesh-eating monster wasn't an everyday occurrence. If one discounted the grimm, that was, which to a huntress had a tendency of being somewhat regular companions. And they did eat flesh, and bones, and everything in between, which, logically, would include brains. So one could argue that they were, indeed, brain-eating threats as well. But then, they were just weird shadowy things, and nobody really knew where the came from, what they were made of, or where they went when they dissipated after having their heads lobbed off, so, clearly, the situations were nothing alike. They weren't made of people! Probably…?

Blake almost wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of her thoughts as her mind tried to delay the inevitable against all sound tactical advice, but, whatever had been moving behind her had stopped making any noises a while ago. She was probably safe and just about ready to stop pretending and face her fears head-on. Giving herself a tiny nod of encouragement, she spun around ready to defend herself only to be completely disarmed by two pleading scarlet orbs, framed in a faint gold, staring up at her out of the dark.

That moment, when her eyes met with the impossible, all she could think of was a burning golden heart on a bed of scarlet safely tucked away close to her own…

* * *

 **Author's Note**

And there we are. I know, kind of a dick move to end it on a cliffhanger, but it is supposed to be Blake's prologue (or trailer if you will), and the actual story begins from here on out. There may or may not be a _Yellow_ counterpart in the works that shows Yang's perspective, which would stop at the same point, but that one is proving a lot more difficult to write than expected.

Speaking of Yang, let's just get this out of the way first: Yang is not a mummy, or a zombie, or anything like that. Blake is absolutely right in assuming that the undead don't exist in their world. She is also not a dragon. I never got why people are all gung ho about her being a dragon—I can only assume it's because of her name—when there is something far more suitable for Yang to be found in mythology. Just think of the Branwen-family theme, people. It's so obvious and so much more awesome than a giant lizard…

 _RWBYFam_ is, however, inspired by _Valkyria Chronicles_ in more ways than just by borrowing the Second-World-War-with-fantasy setting—of which we, admittedly, haven't seen much given that this story was set in a desolate mountain range—and things like the maidens and whatever Yang may or may not turn out to be will fill similar roles than the Valkyrias did in _Valkyria Chronicles._ In a nutshell, whatever Yang is, she's neither (un)dead nor entirely human. Feel free to guess, I might even tell you if you're right.

But let's get back to the story itself. In this version, Blake is caught in quite the quandary as she has backed herself into a corner she can't get out of without breaking a lot of eggs—including her own—while Yang, well, she has already broken hers. I'm not going to spoil that part, of course, but life has not been kind to Yang. Her recovery and their subsequent return to civilization should be quite the ride and would cover most the first two story arcs.

And, in case anybody was wondering (or was about to tell me how predictable that big reveal at the end was), what Blake was looking for was was never really meant to be a secret from the reader to begin with. It's one of the problems with fan fiction that it's very difficult to surprise people with that sort of thing as they already know all the characters and the relationships between them. The moment Qrow showed up giving Blake a hand, the jig was up. Even if I hadn't let him drop some hints for Blake to figure things out with hindsight, I doubt trying to keep it from the reader would have worked. But, of course, I can only look at the story from the perspective of someone who already knew what would be waiting at the end of the tunnel, so I might be dead wrong for all I know.

I'm honestly not sure how well a job I've done with Blake in this story. She always seems to turn out a bit jumpy and neurotic when I try to write her, but in this instance, I pushed her deliberately to the brink of a mental breakdown as the stress of her life as a whole and where it has lead her start to get the better of her. My Blake is also very weak when it comes to ghost stories (a random bit of trivia originating in _RWBYNov_ ), which, I believe, has turned out quite helpful in showing Blake's descent towards the end.

I have similar reservations to my portrayal of Qrow. I thought it would be rather interesting to have him interact with Blake without Yang or Ruby around (something that will probably not happen very often in, say, _RWBYNov_ ), but I, sort of, pulled his personality out of my ass as I haven't watched an episode with him in it in a long time. I like how he turned out, but I might have dialed him a bit too far towards the uncaring tough-guy act he likes to wear like a mask. That being said, there is a very good reason _why_ he's quite the drunken bum in this story, which we obviously haven't gotten around to in detail yet.

On the romantic side of things, you can expect Yang and Blake to hook up with each other. They are the reason why I come to the _RWBY_ fandom to begin with, so Bumblebee is a given. Mind you, I hadn't planned for Blake to end up crushing on Yang even before they met, but that turned out to be a rather useful addition for some things I've planned for later on down the line, so I just ran with it.

White Rose is also a very strong possibility, but it would take quite a while for Ruby and Weiss to actually make their way into the story as the opening story arcs mostly revolve around Blake and Yang. Ruby would probably show up in the second arc but only as a side character at that point, and Weiss not before the third, though there is the chance that she might have a cameo in the first, which will most likely include Yang crossing paths with Winter. (Spoiler: They won't exactly get along…)

The weapons we are used to are similarly late arrivals. Starting out, Yang doesn't have a weapon at all, while Blake is only carrying a simple sword (think Ashitaka in _Princess Mononoke_ ) and her trusty ice ax (which is just a temporary thing). I'm sure that a lot of people out there were ready to complain when Blake didn't have a gun to shoot the fire charge with, but the lack of physics-defying transforming weaponry is part of the reduced tech level of this setting. Myrtenaster is a thing because it's very simple in design (and Weiss is stinking rich) and Crimson Rose is a thing because it's Ruby's. (Also note that Qrow's weapon wasn't described as a sword but just as a "weapon," almost as if Blake wasn't entirely sure what it might be.) The technology is around, but it's very, very rare and expensive. Generally speaking, we are looking at simple weapon designs with Mantle/Atlas coming closest to the actual show.

Which reminds me, much of the world design was done long before the fourth volume gave us some insight into the Great War (and Blake's background), which means that there are certain inconsistencies with canon in this version. For example, the SDC and the hunter academies exist already (founded after the Great War in canon), but since people like Ozpin and Ironwood were also transplanted back, I'll just blame it on that. The roles of Vacuo and Mistral during the war are also inverted, and I'm not entirely sure if I can change that given the plot I have in mind on the grand scheme of things, but I'll work something out. As for Blake, her part was written while I was still under the assumption that she was an orphan (the whole rich and accepting parental background still doesn't sit too well with me…) hence the strong attachment to Oobleck as a father figure.

Which brings me to the Great War. I do think using a more regular, symmetric wartime background would be interesting to work with, and I do have some story arcs I'm considering using for later on, but, for the most part, I'm thinking of using a prewar setting with the world standing at the brink of disaster and things just getting worse and worse as we go along. Even if the war were to happen "on screen," it would only be background noise for what the characters are up to. It would never become a foot-soldiers-in-the-army kind of story.

Mind you, either way, things will be very wordy, slow, and padded with lots and lots of slice of life and fluffiness, but not quite as much as is the case with _RWBYNov._

For example, looking at this short story, we have Blake being cold, walking into a cave, and making friends with a mummy (kind of). It's not exactly all that much meat for about 11k words, but that's just how things go with my writing.

There also might be the odd anachronism there. I'm not sure if something like shampoo-commercial models are even a thing yet, but I liked the line a bit too much to change it. I'm also not sure when _Indiana Jones_ was written, but I believe the movies from the 80s where the origin of that franchise an not some book series. Not that it matters, really. Novels about adventuring librarians and archaeologists have been around for a long time, and I think it's fitting that Blake might have developed an appetite for them. Given what she had been working on for a long time, they basically showed her her future, sort of.

And yes, the timeline is a bit different than the original show. Blake has graduated Beacon already and has not met any of the other team RWBY members there. She stuck around working in the library and as Oobleck's teaching assistant before she took off on her expedition. She'd probably be in her early to mid twenties. Yang's age is a bit more complicated to pin down for a variety of reasons, but the apparent age is just about the same as Blake's. She's not that old though. The twenty years were deliberately chosen to make sure that there would be people around that already know her and some family relations were deliberately mixed up in order to fit her better into that time frame.

Oh, and yes, I am well aware that the name "The Great War" might hint towards it being more closely related to the actual Great War (as in, the First World War) than the Second World War, but I'm already meddling with the First World War in _KPFantasy,_ so I decided to pick the second for _RWBYFam._

Anyway, all in all, I believe this story turned out well enough. Writing it certainly was a breath of fresh air and I have lots more material to work with, either for more promo stories or for an actual release. This is easily one of my favorite settings, so there is a good chance that I will continue working on it.

Now, as always, please let me know what you think, and feel free to drop by on Twitter (twitter{.}com/sittschowrites) for news and further information on this and other stories in the works.

That is all.


	3. Yellow

Take a journey down the rabbit hole of Yang's past and find out how she ended up buried in a frozen tomb at the end of the world.

Companion piece to _Black._

* * *

 **Yellow**

"Yang?"

She wasn't in the habit of letting people sneak up on her, but the only danger her nightly intruder posed was to her beauty sleep.

"Are you awake?"

Even half asleep, she had no trouble recognizing her charge's surprisingly inept attempt of sneaking into her room. Who would have thought that someone so small could make so much noise tiptoeing around the place?

Something poked her cheek. "Hello?" Another poke. "Yang?"

She could almost feel the finger hovering over cheek as her late-night guest was watching her for any sign of consciousness. They wouldn't be so lucky as Yang had, through many iterations of their game, become an expert at faking sleep, which was the key to securing what was left of her night's rest.

The intruder shifted and scrambled back to their feet. Rather than leave in defeat however, two small hands grabbed her shoulder and shook her violently.

"You're totally awake, aren't you? You can't fool me!"

Caught in the act, Yang rolled onto her belly with a groan and buried her face in her pillow.

"I knew it! You lied to me," the intruder said with a huff. "Royal guards aren't supposed to lie to their princess!"

"And princesses aren't supposed to sneak into their guards' rooms in the middle of the night, so shoo!"

"I'm pretty sure that's not actually a rule like, you know, the fact that you have to do as I tell you to."

Yang lifted her blankets to invite the pushy princess into her bed, and sure enough, she didn't hesitate to shuffle under the blankets and made herself at home like she had been in the habit of ever since she had been old enough to toddle through the palace's halls on wobbly feet.

Yang studied the small girl as she curled up into a ball with a content sigh. Had the princess even grown at all over the last couple of years? Even after reaching her adolescence, sometimes it felt like she had barely changed from the toddler Yang had first been charged with protecting while she herself had still been barely a child. Her brother had always been quick to point out that it just felt that way because of the rather impressive growth spurt Yang had gone through during her own formative years, but it was hard to be rational about it when confronted with what might as well be a cute little rodent curled up in her bed.

A cute little rodent that looked suspiciously like it had fallen asleep the moment it had hit the pillow.

"Oy!" Yang said, poking a chubby cheek in retaliation. "Waking me up in the middle of the night is one thing," another poke was met with a flailing hand trying to brush her finger away, "but you don't get to plop down and fall asleep right after, _princess._ "

The rodent puffed its cheeks and tried to stare her down. "But your bed is, like, super comfortable and toasty."

"Sure. It's not like yours isn't twice as big and lined in those fancy royal silk sheets." Yang hummed. "It feels like lying down on a giant cotton ball though. You really should get something more sturdy or you'll end up with some serious back problems long before you're old enough to have wrinkles."

"You sound like my mother!"

"Right, well then, to what do I owe the honor of your presence, princess?"

It was the rodents turn to groan and bury her face in a pillow. "Stop talking to me like that. You know I hate it when you go all formal on me."

"You should have thought about that before you forced your way into my bed by quoting your royal right to order me around."

"I'm sorry?"

Yang sighed at the pleading silver eyes peeking out from her pillow, which, at some point during their exchange, had made its way all the way over to the other side of the bed, leaving her annoyingly pillowless.

"Sure, whatever, twerp."

The twerp in question frowned. "I've looked that up in a dictionary, you know. I'm pretty sure you could get into a whole lot of trouble for calling me that."

"Only if you tell on me."

"Never!" the princess blurted out without hesitation only to continue more bashfully, "I like it when you call me by my name. Nobody but Mother ever does no matter how many times I tell them to."

Hardly a surprise given the queen's famously short temper and insistence on proper decorum. Showing any sign of disrespect towards the Princess of Vale was a sure-fire way of getting into a lot of trouble.

Of course, getting into trouble with the queen—or her own father for that matter—had never been something Yang had shied away from. She wouldn't have been surprised if the princess's attachment to her was the only reason why she hadn't been kicked out of the palace, or worse, yet.

"So, Summer," Yang said, obliging to the heartfelt request, "what is it tonight? Don't tell me you're finally ready to confess to my brother?"

Summer's eyes shot open wide and her cheeks turned red as she grasped for a denial. "I don't—I mean—"

"Summer and Taiyang, sitting in a tree—"

"Gah! Stop it!"

An unexpected backhand of downy goodness hit Yang square in the face, almost pushing her off the bed. She couldn't help but laugh as Summer kept pelting her with the pillow to hide her embarrassment, but there was also a hint of pride hidden behind her amusement. Not too long ago, even tired and caught off guard, there would have been no way she would have been hit. Their training—yet another one of those issues that were getting her into trouble with the queen on a regular basis—was paying off. Her little princess was getting fast.

A small puff of feathers signaled the end of the relentless assault. Yang had to stifle a groan at the thought of having to clean up that mess in the morning, but it was quickly forgotten by the sight in front of her. The princess, with crimson cheeks providing a stark contrast to a snow-white silken nightdress, had buried her face in the pillow she was clasping in a death grip to her body. As if that picture wasn't adorable enough, a second puff of downs hat sprung forth from the split seam and covered the bashful girl in loose feathers.

"Wouldn't that be weird?" she asked while wriggling her nose in an attempt to make a precariously balanced itchy offender slide off.

Yang couldn't help herself any longer and started plucking her clean. "How so?"

"We've all grown up together. He's like a brother to me. I can't like like my own brother, can I?"

"I don't see why not. The big oaf likes you, and it's not like you're actually related or anything."

Summer nodded into her pillow, though, not without some apprehension. "Why are you so okay with that? Wouldn't it be weird for you if we were to, you know…"

"Shack up together?"

"Yang!"

Much to her surprise and amusement, Yang had found an entirely new and previously unseen shade of deep crimson on Summer's face that made her wonder if there was any blood left in the rest of her body. Given the day that lay ahead of them though, she decided to dial it down a bit. It would be bad enough without having to deal with a sleep-deprived and grumpy princess on top of everything else.

"Well, at least I'll always know where to find the guy when I have to beat the stuffing out of him for screwing something up with my adorable little sister. Makes my life easier."

That got a snicker out of Summer. "You would totally do that, wouldn't you?"

"Anything for you, kiddo," Yang said, ruffling Summer's hair in affection, which was met with the usual half-hearted protest of a budding teenager who thought that she should be too old to enjoy it but did so far too much to actually want it to stop.

Unfortunately for Yang and contrary to appearances, teenage Summer was far more difficult to distract than kid Summer used to be. She grabbed Yang's arm without warning and eyed her hand as if it had committed some grave and unforgivable offense.

"That's totally not what I came to talk about. You're trying to distract me again!"

Yang fell back on her pillow- and oddly blanketless side of the bed—when did the little sneak have time to cocoon herself in the whole blanket?—and stifled yet another groan.

"How could you be so mean? You know that tomorrow is a big day for me, and I need someone to practice my speech on that isn't a stuffy old coot with no sense of humor!"

"It's not that big a deal."

"What do you mean, 'it's not that big a deal?' It's a huge deal! It's, like, the biggest deal of the year for me as the Princess of Vale, and it's super important if we all want to get along!"

This time, Yang did groan. As much as Summer had started to mature, she was still too naive to see that the queen was using her own daughter as nothing but a political pawn.

"It's the same speech every year anyway. You've got enough practice at it, so just make it up as you go and let me catch some more sleep."

Her protest, however, fell on deaf ears as the pushy princess cleared her throat and morphed from the goofy kid few but Yang ever got to see into the future queen that was about to face the world…

* * *

Despite her small stature and tender age, Summer had always managed to strike an impressive figure whenever she followed her passions, and very few causes resonated more with her than today's. Every year, around the time when all over the world people gave thanks for a successful and bountiful harvest, the City of Vale, far removed from rural life, opted to put another celebration into the foreground: a celebration of diversity and cooperation, of tolerance and acceptance.

It was, without a doubt, Summer's favorite day of the year. There would be a small festival filled with all kinds of junk food for her to indulge in which would climax in a royal address, an "honor" that had been bestowed upon the princess for the last couple of years. And like every year before, Summer had poured her heart into her speech, hoping that it would reach her people and make a difference in the fight against the rising tensions all over the world.

It never had…

Yang hated this day. She had ever since the queen had handed the proceedings over to the princess. She hated how it put Summer in danger. She hated how it dangled her out in the open like bait. She hated how she was used—abused—in a twisted political game she was still too young and naive to understand or accept. She hated how it would take this vibrant young woman, showing all the compassion and enthusiasm that would one day mark her a great leader, only to leave her a broken, sobbing mess by day's end. Most of all, she despised it for doing it over and over again.

Summer's transformation into her royal persona had always struck Yang as odd and somewhat weird, but then, she was one of the few people who got to deal with the real Summer more often than not. Even so, seeing her with her head held high and her voice unwavering and free of the childish quirks she kept holding on to in private, Yang had no doubt that she was a natural, and the gathered crowd seemed to agree with her as they were hanging on their princess's every word.

Unfortunately, no matter how popular or beloved a ruler might be, nobody would ever be without opposition, and the day of the year dedicated to peace and harmony was not going to be an exception to that rule.

Granted, this year's batch of interlopers seemed to be more competent than last year's, but Yang hadn't missed the few unlucky and, frankly, suicidal fools who had been making their way through the gathered masses towards the center stage as the speech dragged on. And she, most certainly, had not missed the huddled groups of shady characters dotting the corners of some of the smaller alleyways surrounding the plaza.

She sighed and took a peek at Summer. Her silver eyes were still shining with hope and passion as she put her everything into her favorite moment of the year, but Yang knew it wouldn't last for much longer. The moment that would turn shining silver into dull gray once again was almost upon them.

If only the princess's talent for protecting herself from the scheming and intrigue that came with a role in politics would have been as pronounced as that for drawing the adoration of her people, it would have been a lot easier for Yang to make up her mind about a decision she would eventually have to face.

Truth be told, Yang didn't blame the day for her predicament—she was actually quite fond of its message. She didn't even blame the people who were about to get themselves killed trying to make a statement. Some were genuinely bad eggs, but most of them were just misguided and had been pushed to the edge by a world that had never given them a fair chance. It wouldn't save them from her wrath should they try to hurt her princess—or make her cry—but she could sympathize at least.

No, there were only two people she truly blamed: herself, for having let yet another year go by without having been able to get up the nerve to tell Summer the painful truth she had yet to figure out for herself, and the queen, for inflicting this wound on her own daughter, deliberately. Every year, she would get Summer's hopes up, put her on a pedestal with a bull's eye painted on her forehead, and watch from the shadows as her daughter's spirit was crushed.

What better way to justify yet another deterioration of civil rights or another bid for more executive power to be handed to the Crown than an attack by some fringe group on a member of the royal family right as they were imploring the world for more tolerance, understanding, and peace?

While Vale might still have been a far cry from being as bad as Mantle in most aspects, it didn't take a clairvoyant to figure out the direction the queen, with the oh-so respectable and honorable captain of the royal guard steadfast at her side, was steering her kingdom in.

To Yang, it was becoming increasingly clear that waiting for nature to take its course might not be an option anymore. The queen was young and could continue her reign for decades to come. There was no telling what damage she could still do to her own daughter, to her kingdom, and even to the world before it would be Summer's turn to pick up the pieces.

A flash of icy blue cut Yang's musings of the future short. Once again, any hope for a peaceful festival had been thwarted as one of the figures she had been keeping an eye on had gotten close enough to the stage to make their move. A large icicle conjured up from dust was sent straight at the princess, mid-sentence. That alone deserved some extra attention once Yang would get her hands on the guy.

The attack itself wasn't particularly dangerous. Summer had managed to convince her mother to be allowed to attend Beacon the following semester, and Yang had done her best to whip the princess into shape in preparation. Her favorite pupil could have easily defended herself, but the royal family had a certain image to uphold in public and, more importantly, there was something to be said about the people trying to kill them not knowing how well they could defend themselves if cornered.

So Yang did the one part of her job she had ever taken seriously and jumped in to protect her princess. Before any of the other guards could get anywhere near the podium, Yang was at Summer's side and stopped the icicle dead in the air. Golden flames tore into with ease as she crushed it in her hand.

And with that flash of gold, almost like a starting signal, all hell broke loose. Half a dozen more figures started lobbing dust projectiles towards the center stage—their aim, luckily, was far worse than the first guy's—while the gathered crowd had started to shift and move away from the dust-wielding maniacs attacking their princess and her guards.

The sudden appearance of fires and walls of ice around the plaza answered the question as to what the shady stragglers had been up to. With most of the smaller exits barred, the chaos in the crowd only got worse, and the massive stream of people rushing out the few remaining escape routes made it impossible for reinforcements to filter in.

"But—" a dismayed Summer stammered as she watched on. "I was almost done. And it was going so well. They were all listening, and being happy and nice to each other."

Yang almost blurted out that her efforts had been doomed from the start, but it wasn't the time or the place to finally find the courage to tell Summer the truth.

Something about the way things had been going kept bothering her. Even without reinforcements, the few attackers who might have had any a chance of making it to the stage were outnumbered two to one by highly trained and well equipped royal guards. Unless they had something else up their sleeves, it was nothing but a suicide mission from the start, and they sure didn't act like they wanted to die. They had stopped trying to send any attacks towards the stage and were putting a lot of effort into staying out of the guards' reach as they kept drawing them further into the plaza.

Dammit! Yang took a quick look around. There were only two more guards left at the stage barring the stairs on either side. Everyone else but Yang—whom most guardsmen had long since given up on expecting to follow any orders despite having been perpetually stuck at their lowest rank—had followed the lieutenant in charge in trying to apprehend the attackers. It was a diversion from the start, and the idiots had fallen right for it.

"Sorry, kiddo," Yang said as she grabbed Summer's arm, "but we've got to split, now!"

Before she could pull the princess into the relative safety of the small winding alleyways of the old city and its many hidden entrances to the incredibly useful curfew-breaking devices that were the palace's escape tunnels, the hairs on her neck stood on edge.

Yang pushed Summer away from herself only to be almost clipped by a large disembodied ax that had come down on the podium, shattering it in a single blow.

A ripple formed in front of her, revealing three more attackers where previously there had been nothing but thin air. One of them—a massive faunus with bull horns and patches of shaggy brown fur all over his body—was trying to recover his weapon from where it had gotten wedged in the floorboards of the stage, but Yang wasn't about to give him the chance to rejoin the fight. With a quick turn, she let her shin connect with his side at full force. His aura put up a good fight trying to shield him, but it wasn't enough. She could see the ripples of light run over his body as it collapsed and felt something break inside of him as she sent his limp form tumbling over the plaza towards the other guards.

Somewhere in the background, Summer called out to her, but before she could check on the princess, the crackling of electricity followed by a sharp pain in her side drew Yang's attention to the remaining attackers. One of them had somehow not only managed to catch her in her blind spot but to pierce her aura with ease.

Yang couldn't believe her luck. It was just about the worst possible time for her to screw up and get seriously hurt, but she couldn't afford to let it bring her down. Not yet, anyway. She managed to step back and dislodge the spear from her side without causing too much additional damage before positioning herself between Summer and her attackers.

Her opponent, a tall woman with spotted blond hair that was clad in some sort of tribal outfit, seemed taken aback by the lack of impact her attack had had on her opponent, but she recovered quickly and went back on the offensive.

Yang grabbed the spear jabbed at her and diverted the tip away from her body as it dove in. She tried to yank it out of the woman's hand, but her opponent was intent on staying armed. Instead of ensuring control over her weapon however, the woman lost their contest of strength and ended up stumbling towards Yang, who didn't hesitate to deliver a vicious punch to her abdomen that left her sprawled out on the floor, coughing and gasping for air.

With two of their attackers down for the count, all that was left standing was an old and rather rotund man that, instead of hair, seemed to have fins running over the length of his head. Just as Yang was about to make her move though, he took a step back with a look of horror marring his face. He hastily struck some sort of protective symbol in front of him and mumbled something under his breath.

Yang's grasp of the countless tribal dialects of the faunus was limited at best. She could only make out a few words that roughly translated to something along the lines of red-eyed devil, which did not brighten her mood. She took a quick look around, mostly searching the sky. The last thing she needed with herself wounded and Summer out in the open, was a flock of nosey nevermore crashing the party.

It wasn't until the woman had recovered her breath and managed to speak again, that Yang realized whom the old man had been talking about.

"What kind of a monster are you?" she asked with a look somewhere between fear and disgust trained on Yang.

It had been a jarring enough thing to do for Yang to finally take stock of herself. She had suspected adrenaline or shock to be the cause of her lack of pain, but where there should have been—where there had been a lot of blood soaking her clothes down to her boots, all there was were remnants of golden flames trickling down her side, and where there had been a gaping wound, there was a smoldering inferno. Even the tip of the spear was no longer covered in wild arcs of electricity but in gently wafting flames fueled by the remainders of her blood.

Yang dropped it like a hot potato and took a step back in disbelief as she studied herself. None of it made any sense. Sure, she was one of the lucky few with an aura that manifested as something actually useful like fire, and while she hadn't ever been seriously hurt before, she'd had plenty of scrapes and bruises. Her blood did not spontaneously combust into flames, and her insides did not look like the heart of white-hot steel furnace. She didn't have to have taken Advanced Anatomy and Physiology to know that that wasn't a thing!

"Yang? Are you okay? What's going on?"

No and absolutely no idea would have been the honest answers for a very worried-sounding princess, but Yang couldn't afford to freak her out more than she must already have been. She shook her head trying to regain her composure and forced herself to ignore whatever was going on with her. With reinforcements still being delayed and some of the previously closed off alleyways reopened to allow more of their attackers in, they couldn't afford to linger.

"I'm fine."

"But you're hurt! And why are your eyes all red and creepy?"

Well, that explained the old man's outburst, only it didn't. She filed it away as just one more weird detail to sort out later—if there should be a later for her—and grabbed Summer's hand, pulling her towards the back of the stage.

"I'm fine. Now run, we need to get out of here!"

As long as she could manage to push Summer into one of the escape tunnels and lock the door behind her while whatever it was that was going on with herself was still keeping her on her feet, the princess should be able to find her way back to the safety of the palace…

* * *

Shrill whistles and barking dogs broke the silence of the palace's gardens by night. Had they come closer or had she gained ground on them? Between the darkness—Remnant's broken moon was barely a sliver in the sky—and the cloud on her mind, Yang couldn't possibly tell.

She kept running as fast as her unsteady legs allowed her to in order to cross the open grounds of what a little princess had once insisted on calling her backyard. Sharp gravel was digging into her bare feet with every step, tearing them to shreds in ways her aura should never have allowed to happen. It didn't matter. She couldn't afford to go out of her way for comfort.

As she reached the banister separating the minutely shaped upper gardens from the sprawling lower gardens, she noticed a second group of bloodhounds closing in from her left and cursed under her breath. So much for her escape route.

She grabbed hold of the banister and peeked over the edge. A two, maybe three story drop? On a good day, she wouldn't even hesitate, but this was hardly a good day, and she didn't have much of a choice. Taking a deep breath and summoning whatever shreds of her aura she could to protect herself from the fall, she jumped.

As she reached the bottom and her feet connected with wet grass, she slipped, landing her rather ungracefully on her ass. A sharp pain in her wrist made it clear that she hadn't succeeded in bringing out enough of her aura, but at least she had only broken a wrist and not an ankle. As long as she could still run, all wasn't lost quite yet.

She scrambled to her feet and ran off into the dark. By the sound of it, her pursuers had decided to take the stairs found on either corner of the upper gardens rather than the direct route, which should buy her some time. It also meant that they could bring the dogs down with them. Between her dulled senses, compromised reflexes, and fading aura, she had little hope of winning a head-on fight with a pack of trained war dogs should they catch up with her. And catch up they would if she stayed out in the open like that.

At least the moisture of the grass had a soothing effect on her bloody and torn soles. It must have rained not too long ago, which made her wonder how long it had been since she had seen anything but sterile white walls and stainless steel fixtures. Weeks? Months? Once the drug regimen had started, she had lost all track of time.

As a shot echoed through the night, Yang dove behind the cover of a tree on instinct. The moment she hit the deck, she cursed herself, again, for how jumpy and pathetic her newfound vulnerability had left her. She didn't have time to dwell on it though. When a quick peek around her cover didn't reveal any traces of her pursuers, she jumped back onto her feet and continued running.

It wasn't long before she spotted the second group of guards closing in on her flank. They were headed straight for her. If she kept trying to outrun the first group, they would steer her right into the second, but if she were to try and split the difference, they would both be gaining ground on her.

Dammit! She chose the middle path, hoping that she would be able to come up with something better before it was too late.

Unfortunately, that better idea didn't seem willing to come to her. Not only that, but between changing directions several times to keep her lead evened out and her lack of sight in the dark, she was losing track of where she was going. She wasn't even sure anymore if she was still headed toward the outer walls or blindly running in circles.

Just as she was about ready to hit something in frustration despite the risk of breaking another wrist, a large and oddly featureless rectangular structure popped out of the dark in front of her. The sudden appearance had her stumped, and it wasn't until she touched a wall that she realized what she had stumbled upon. It was one of Summer's favorite childhood playgrounds: a hedge maze constructed by one of the royal family's more eccentric ancestors.

Perfect! It was massive—even most of the palace guards didn't know the layout—it had only two exits—as far as most people knew about at least—and she had caught it in full bloom of all times. The patchwork of colorful flowers woven throughout the maze made it smell like the inside of a perfume bottle—it was nauseating and could linger for weeks—but it might just be enough to throw the dogs off her scent for long enough to sneak out through one of the secret exits.

Yang headed straight for the entrance and dove past the first few rows of hedges. Out of sight for the moment, she tried to recall the layout that had been ingrained into her memory over countless of sessions of maze tag and other silly games they had played as kids.

It all came back to her in a flash as if it had been yesterday. She hurried through the maze without stopping or looking back. Right at the second intersection from the entrance, then left, left, right, straight ahead and past the marble bird bath, another double left followed by a right to avoid the dead end with the blue gazebo; traversing the maze was second nature to Yang. She kept dodging and weaving around corners at breakneck speed—or at least what counted for it on wobbly legs and with a head that felt like it had been wrapped in a giant novelty cotton ball for the better part of the year—until she found another familiar pattern in the walls.

Bingo! The second turn to the right would lead her into a U-turn with no exit, but there was a hollowed out section of wall hidden to one side that cut right across the maze leading to another secret passage connected to the outside far from either of the regular entrances.

She dashed around the U-turn, confident of being one step closer to freedom, when she ran straight into a solid wall of hedge. Once again, she found herself sprawled out on the floor.

No, no, no, no! She scrambled to her knees and, despite the pain in her wrist, frantically tore at the thick hedge in search of the opening. But it wasn't there. Had they patched it up? Had she just been kidding herself when she thought she still remembered the layout after all those years? She tried the other side of the dead end—maybe she had just mixed up her directions—but it didn't budge either.

This was bad. Very, very bad. If she couldn't find any of the hidden passages, she had just hidden in a giant trap with no way out.

She needed to calm down and think. Running around a maze like a headless chicken wouldn't do her any good. Worse, it would cost her the only advantage she had. After all, the palace guard had enough manpower to comb the place back to front without leaving any openings. Hell, if her father or the queen got involved, chances were they would just burn it down around her and scrape up whatever was left of her. Fire might be her friend, but without the protection of her aura, that friendship might well be more than she could handle…

It was somewhere along this increasingly frustrating train of thoughts that Yang noticed the lack of growling dogs and shouting voices surrounding her. The thick walls were good at suppressing noise, but they weren't that good. If a small army of guards and angry dogs had followed her into the maze, she would have known about it by now.

Could they have missed her? They wouldn't have given up on their chase—not without incurring the wrath of the queen or their captain—but maybe they had assumed that nobody on the run would be stupid enough to corner themselves by hiding in a maze with no way out? If the dogs had lost her scent at the entrance, they might just be aimlessly scouring the area, allowing her to wait them out and steal away in relative safety later on.

She pinched her cheeks and sighed deeply. Yeah, no way. Even if the dogs had lost her scent, they would have lead the guards right to the entrance. Chances were, they were just waiting for reinforcements, leaving her with little time to waste.

While trying to picture the layout of the maze in her head again, she made her way back out the U-turn. Just as she was about to turn the corner, she heard two sets of footprints approaching and froze in her step. They were coming closer, no doubt about it, and there were only two paths for them to take in this corner of the maze, both leading into dead ends within a couple of yards.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to figure out her best course of action. But there wasn't any. Even if they checked the wrong path first, her window of opportunity for sneaking out undetected would be tiny, and with her still moving more like a drunken sailor than her usual graceful self, she might as well just give herself up. Which left picking a fight she was bound to lose and slipping through a secret passage she had already proven to be nonexistent as her only other options.

And just because life hadn't been kicking her enough of late, the footsteps turned right in her direction, robbing her of even the small chance she might have had to slip away. A fight it was then, but not without one last desperate attempt to thwart fate.

Yang dove back toward the dead end, fully aware that she would be noticed, and put everything she had into drawing out her flames. But what should have been a raging inferno turning that stupid fake fake wall into ashes turned out to be little more than a pathetic spark fizzling out in the dark without so much as scorching the hedge.

The only thing she had achieved, was to make her head spin from exertion. She barely managed to keep herself upright against the wall as she went down on her knees.

"Look at what has become of you, girl. It is disgraceful."

She turned around with her eyes wide in disbelief, but there she was, the queen herself with her loyal lapdog right at her side.

"How did _you_ find me? You were nowhere near when I broke out of the lab."

The queen didn't even try to hide the superior smirk on her lips behind the gaudy feathered fan she liked to employ as a tool of false modesty. "Oh, please. We hardly had to break a sweat to follow you stumbling around my grounds. Or could it be that your mind is more befuddled than I expected it to be? Did you actually believe that you had made good time on your feeble attempt of an 'escape?'"

Anger welled up inside of her. Enough so to scramble back on her feet and get ready to protect herself. "What are you saying? That you let me escape? That you hunted me down as part of some twisted game?"

"A game? Hardly. Though I can see why you might consider it as such. I did indeed facilitate your escape, and the guards were merely in play to corner you, not to apprehend you. After all, we wouldn't want any of them to get too close to the truth about you, now, would we?"

Yang's hands balled into fists. She had never before in her life wanted to punch the smug look off of somebody's face as badly as in that very moment, but when her father's hand came to rest on the hilt of his sword in response, she knew that it would be a futile effort. He had made his choice a long time ago, and she knew that there would be no point in trying to get him on her side.

Instead, she settled for the obvious question on her mind: "why? What the hell are you after?"

The queen sighed and shook her head dramatically. "Language, dear. You were given the finest education the Kingdom of Vale has to offer in order to be a proper companion to its princess. Show some gratitude at least, and do not make me regret letting you anywhere near my daughter even more so than I already do."

Yang laughed. "What is it to you? It's not like you've ever shown any interest in her outside of playing politics."

"Yes, well, it is this attitude of yours that left you in your current predicament as much as your foul nature. Do not believe for a second that I missed how you looked at me over these past few years. What, pray tell, gives you, an easily replaceable servant, the right to decided what would be best for my daughter?"

Yang relaxed her stance and took a calming breath. Even her drug-addled mind could see where this was headed. She might as well make the best out of it.

"I don't know. How about the fact that I was right there at her side her entire life? I was there to read her her bedtime stories. I was there when she took her first steps. I was there to help her with her homework. I was there whenever she got sick. And I was there to protect her whenever _your_ enemies came after her. She might not be my blood, but she is _my_ little sister, and I was more of a mother to her than a selfish old hag like you could ever have been."

"Silence! Show some respect in the end at least!"

Yang scoffed. "Right, it's not like either of you deserves any, but okay, let me put that oh-so-great education you blessed me with to use. This escape was as fake as your promises about helping me figure out whatever the hell is going on with me.

"Well, I suppose technically it wasn't a lie. You never actually promised me to help me, just to help me understand, so I suppose I can see where the confusion is coming from. To me, it meant actually helping me, to you, it meant declaring me dead and keeping me drugged out of my mind in your little basement shop of horrors to use me as a lab rat. Same difference, really.

"So how did we get here? Since my mind had been feeling more together again of late, I'm guessing that whatever immunities I've been building up were starting to outstrip the arsenal of drugs you've been using to keep me docile." She smirked. "My chains were coming loose, and it would have only been a matter of time until I would have broken free anyway.

"You couldn't have that. But you also couldn't just kill me. Not with all those valuable and dangerously well-informed minds running around the lab still interested in playing with me. Having to dispose of them would have been a bad investment, so you went for a compromise: make it look like I escaped by myself while I was still easy enough to handle, and kill me 'accidentally' while trying to apprehend me."

The queen answered with a patronizing slow clap. "Very good. Very good, indeed. I see that not all my efforts of civilizing you have been in vain."

"Don't flatter yourself. It's hardly a genius plan. You want to kill someone? Hand them an unloaded gun and shoot them in self-defense. How much more cliche could you get?"

"If that's how you feel about it, there really is no need to prolong this any further is there? You are an abomination and a traitor waiting to happen. Neither have any place in my kingdom."

Yang laughed before getting ready to strike. "You know, I've come this far, I might as well go all the way, right?"

As quick as the drugs still coursing through her system allowed her to, she dashed forward, aiming right for the queen. Much to her surprise, there wasn't any pain as cold steel bit deep into her body. There wasn't much of anything, really, aside from a familiar warmth that swallowed her whole and a sense of freedom as the wind rushed over her feathers…

* * *

A content sigh escaped her as a gentle autumn breeze brushed through her long hair. She could feel it, just outside of her reach. A memory bubbling to the surface only to never break through. At first, she had hated those moments, felt like they were mocking her, but as days had turned into weeks, she had come to find an odd solace in them. They allowed her to feel like herself without the need to uncover whatever demons might lurk in the deep.

"Hoy, Blondie!" a stocky old man shouted from the corner of the log cabin she had been calling home ever since she had quite literally dropped by the place. "Why the hell are you still here? That pile of firewood won't be growing legs and go about delivering itself anytime soon!"

"Yeah, yeah, old man," she said as she kept enjoying the breeze. "You better stop yapping and start hacking or I'll be back long before you'll have the next load ready."

Jack, or Old Man Jack as most of the villagers called him despite his insistence on being neither old nor named Jack, grumbled into his beard. "What did I tell you about your rhymes and word malarkey? Dang poets and showfolk don't eat under my roof! Now move your bony ass!"

She laughed as he disappeared behind the cabin. If ever anybody needed pointers for a grumpy old lumberjack living in the woods all by himself for a storybook, all they had to do was spend a day with Old Man Jack. The man was a natural.

Despite his gruff exterior though, he had turned out to be a surprisingly kind-hearted man. She didn't know many people who would take a perfect stranger with no memories of who they were or how they had ended up randomly falling out of a tree into their home, no questions asked. At least that's what she suspected given that she couldn't actually remember any of the people she knew—had known?

She shook her head and hoisted the day's first delivery onto her back. The ease with which she could lift the heavy rack of firewood from the ground never ceased to amaze her. It wasn't so much that it was an exceptional feat around these parts—those hardy village girls sure could hold their own against even the strongest of men around—or that she wasn't in great shape—quite the opposite, in fact—but that she seemed to be on an entirely different level from anybody else.

Being strong was one thing. Being able to destroy a guy whose arms were twice as wide as her own in arm wrestling without breaking a sweat or ending up as a team of one during a friendly bout of tug of war with the village youth and still ending up the winner, now that was another thing entirely.

She had asked the old man about it one evening at dinner. He just muttered something about "that aura malarkey"—he seemed to love that word—and told her to go wash the damn dishes as he sure as hell wasn't going to ruin his back slaving over them while he had a youngster in the house.

He was probably on the right track. His back was showing its age. Half the time, he could barely walk after a day's worth of chopping wood, the other half he complained about still hurting from the day before. Being a lumberjack didn't feel like the kind of occupation the elderly should indulge in, but the old coot was stubborn as a mule about it.

He was probably right about the aura thing as well. She sure seemed to know a lot about auras and semblances for someone who had never used any of that stuff. At least not to her knowledge, though, that wasn't saying much these days. She had even tried to get some pointers on practical use from the few villagers that had experience with it themselves, but success had been limited.

Oh, who was she kidding? None of the things she had been told to try had done anything for her. It seemed like whatever she may or may not have been doing had a mind of its own. It would just happen, whether she wanted it to or not.

She laughed at herself as she walked towards the small path connecting the old man's lonely clearing with the rest of the village. It felt like such a long time ago that she had been nothing but a tightly wound bundle of frustration ready to burst about these things when, really, it had only been about a week or two since she had come to terms with it all and decided to just go with the flow.

Life had turned out a lot more enjoyable that way. So what if she knew a lot about all that esoteric stuff telling people that they could manifest their soul in fancy light shows? She also knew a lot about the grimm, and she sure as hell had no desire to ever figure out why she was able to recite entire passages of what had to have been some twisted, nightmare-inducing textbooks in her sleep.

There were some things in life one was better off not knowing, like that that growling coming from back around the cabin sounded suspiciously like that of a beowolf rather than that of any ordinary wolf or some other woodland critter.

Her eyes went wide as she froze in her step. There it was again, and again. No, she was not hearing that! The village was technically considered part of the frontier belt between the kingdom and the wilderness beyond, but aside from the odd nevermore dropping by and trying to peck somebody's eyes out, it hadn't seen any grimm pass by it in years.

She swallowed hard and kept listening. Just as she thought that her mind had been playing tricks on her, she heard a familiar gruff voice followed by a whole host of growling noises.

"Dammit, you stinking beasts! You want a piece of me? Come and get it!" Old Man Jack yelled, overshadowing them all.

She wasn't sure when she had shed the rack from her back or when she had started running, but by the time she had come back to her senses, she had just raced around the corner of her new home and right into a scene out of a real-life nightmare.

A massive beowolf swatted two of its pack mates off a barely recognizable pile of flesh and bones before burying its blood-covered muzzle back deep inside of its bowels. Three more beowolves were circling the scene, occasionally diving in trying to steal a bite only to be warned off with a bone-chilling growl by the alpha. The most bizarre part of the picture however, must have been the two beowolves further back who were engaged in an oddly playful tug of war over a disembodied leg.

Sheer terror wasn't strong enough a description for the feeling welling up inside of her. Yes, there was a whole host of information stuck in her head about the grimm in front of her. She knew, in painstaking detail, about their physiology, about their attack patterns, about how they would descend on her, about what damage those vicious claws and fangs would do to her, and so on. She also knew how to best approach a fight with them—solo or in a team—what weapons should be used, and how to gauge the odds of survival given just about any scenario imaginable.

She knew what she was facing, and she knew how she was supposed to fight it, and yet, it made no difference as the one thing her fractured mind did not provide her with was actual experience in facing down the monsters of legends and nightmares that had held the world in an iron grip of terror and fear since the beginning of recorded history and beyond.

And so she did what most people would do in her situation: putting every effort into holding on to her sanity, she tried to back away from the pack without drawing their attention.

It went well for the first two steps or four—she wasn't exactly in the right mindset to focus on math or the small details—until she stepped on something squishy and lost her footing.

Prone on the ground and torn between checking on the man-eating monstrosities she was trying to escape from and the squishy rock that had tipped her at what must have been the worst possible moment imaginable, she made the mistake of checking on the squishy rock. Only, it wasn't a rock, squishy or otherwise. Barely a foot from where she had landed, lay what remained of an overly hairy arm still holding on to a familiar ax.

If her graceless fall hadn't alarmed the pack to her presence, her surprised yelp at the gruesome discovery sure had. All but one cheeky beowolf, who used the alpha's distraction to steal a bite from the old man's carcass, were focused on her.

This was it. She knew it. She had that damn encyclopedia in her head after all. There was no way she could outrun a beowolf, let alone a pack hunting her down.

No, there were only two ways out of this mess: dead or as the last man standing.

She summoned all the courage she could and scrambled forward to pry the ax out of the disembodied hand. It was firmly clamped shut, but that wasn't much of an obstacle for her. She would have to apologize to the old man though, as she was pretty sure that she had broken a couple of his fingers in the process. But that had to wait. She got back on her feet and held the ax out in front of her with shaky hands, unsure what to do next.

The pack didn't seem to be inclined to make its move. The two beowolves in the back had returned to playing with the leg and refused to acknowledge her presence any further—for some insane reason, that seemed to bug her to no end—while the alpha was just staring at her from behind the monstrous bone mask that was his face with what she could have sworn to be a hint of curiosity in its eyes.

Their standoff was finally broken when one of the smaller beowolves charged forward with a vicious growl. Caught off guard by the sudden outburst, she stumbled back and, once again, landed on the ground with a surprised yelp.

Before she could curse herself for screwing up her last stand before it had even begun, a shrill caw echoed throughout the clearing, bringing the whole scene to a standstill.

A lone raven was sitting at the edge of the cabin's roof. Well, it might have been a raven if it hadn't been for those scarlet eyes glaring down at her. Just her luck. Because a pack of beowolves trying to eat her wasn't bad enough, now she would get some first-hand experience at a nevermore's love for pecking people's eyes out as an appetizer.

The avian attack never came, and it wasn't long before the young beowolf got tired of waiting and tried to make another pass at her. And once again, their newest arrival interfered. It rose up, spread its wings, and released another vicious caw that sounded oddly like a threat not against her but against the pack.

Apparently, she wasn't the only one who seemed to think so. Most of the beowolves had taken to cowering with their heads low and their tails between their legs. The one who had tried to attack her had even let out a whimper like a beaten dog as it took a couple of steps back. Only the alpha remained unaffected as it continued to study the scene unfolding in front of it.

The nevermore settled down again and returned its gaze to her. It wasn't until that moment, that she noticed the lack of the signature bone mask of the grimm, which didn't mesh with the encyclopedia in her head. Her curiosity about the new discovery was cut short however, when she noticed the expectant look on the bird's face.

Could birds even look expectantly at someone? Sure, why not. If supposedly mindless nightmares could look at her with curiosity, then having a weird, red-eyed bird give her a raised eyebrow wasn't all that far-fetched, was it?

Having gained her full attention, the bird looked back at the still surprisingly well-behaved pack of beowolves. Her eyes followed, and she couldn't help but notice that finding herself confronted with them was no longer causing the same mind-numbing fear and terror it had before. It felt more like watching a litter of extremely ugly puppies rather than staring down a pack of starved, feral strays.

She turned back to the bird with a questioning look on her face, only to have it mirrored back at her. If she hadn't known better, she could have sworn that it had shrugged its shoulders as if to ask, "well, what are you waiting for?"

She shook her head in amusement and rose to her feet. All the attention in the clearing returned to her, but she couldn't care less. Her hands were steady and her ax just casually dangling at her side, no longer raised in some feeble attempt of self defense.

Her eyes locked with the alpha, a serene smile on her lips. For a moment, she wanted to laugh at the sight in front of her almost as much as she wanted to laugh at herself. Even as the pack started to come out of its stupor, she couldn't, for the life of her, remember why she had been so afraid of them.

She looked up at the sky, closed her eyes, and let the gentle autumn breeze wash over her. She could feel them once again rising towards the surface. Memories of similar predicaments. Memories of far greater dangers than the one she was finding herself in. Memories not painted in fear and terror but anticipation and excitement. And finally, after all those weeks of uncertainty, one of them reached the surface and broke through.

As the inferno of her soul flared back into life, Yang felt whole again, and the last words of her late host came to her mind.

"You want a piece of me?" She raised her arms, daring them to make a move. "Come and get it…"

* * *

She was floating. Floating in a dull world in which the sky had no color and the wind made no noise. A world in which she felt neither warm nor cold. A world in which she couldn't even remember if those were things people felt or if she had just made them up.

Fluffy clouds were doting the sky, but even their appeal was lost on her as she could see nothing but gray blobs on an even grayer backdrop. Still, she tried to reach out to them with her translucent arm, but they remained beyond her reach.

Translucent? That didn't sound right to her. She studied the vague outline of a gray hand through which she could still see gray clouds hanging in a gray sky. It didn't look right either. She was pretty sure that she had been opaque at some point. Was turning translucent part of getting old? No, that was just silly. Old people turned wrinkly, not invisible.

She brought her hands to her face, but no matter how hard her fingers raked over her skin, she could barely feel the contact. It was enough though, to figure out that she wasn't wrinkly. Not old then.

She probably would have remembered that, wouldn't she? Kids, grandkids, someone warming the bed next to her? There was that word again. Warmth. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but it sounded like something she should strive for.

A muffled scream—no, something more familiar, like an order barked out by someone firmly in charge—interrupted her thoughts and drew her attention to the ground where her eyes were immediately captured by something weird, something that didn't seem like it belonged in this world: color.

There, in the center of a gray cobblestone square surrounded by a sea of gray streets and gray houses hovered a misshapen blue sphere. Shards of ice were caught in currents of water that dragged them all over its surface while a small army of ants dressed in strange gray suits, wearing strange gray helmets, and holding on to strange gray shields was dancing around it and throwing more bits of blue and white at it.

It looked like they were having fun. So much so, that even the ants without strange gray shields that were standing at the sidelines barking orders couldn't dampen their spirits.

She wanted to join them—fun, she had concluded, was a good thing even though she couldn't really tell what it felt like either—but just like when she had been trying to reach the clouds, her body refused to move from its spot. It just hovered there, dooming her to remain nothing but a spectator as the world moved on without her.

Frustration, she concluded, was not something she should strive for. With a sigh that made no sound, she took her eyes off the busy ants next to the sphere and took a closer look at the dull gray town surrounding them instead. It wasn't all that big, more like a large village cradled by a few gently rolling hills, but she got the impression that it would be a rather nice place to live in. At least it might have been if it had been a little less gray.

Maybe she wasn't alone in thinking so. It would explain why so many of the ants not wearing strange gray suits where hurrying away from the town center.

No, that didn't make any sense. Why would they run away from the only splotch of color this world had to offer if they disliked gray as much as she did?

Maybe they just didn't know any better? Were ants like people? They looked like them—two arms, two legs, one head—maybe they were just as afraid of things they didn't know or understand as people seemed to be? Things like those giant beetles with their weird round legs and those big horns sticking out of their backs. They looked like something one should be afraid of.

Most of the ants gave them a wide berth as they closed in on the sphere, though, the ones wearing their strange gray suits crowded happily around them instead.

The beetles, however, didn't seem to notice or care much about the ants. Their horns were pointing at the sphere as if they were drawn to it while they ignored everything else around them. One of them even hit the corner of a building as it made a turn, so distracted was it by the floating ball of white and blue.

A new flash of color appeared from inside one of the beetles' horns that drew her attention. She watched in anticipation as it lit up in a faint blue only to curl up in pain before she even got a good look at what was happening.

Her hands had shot to her abdomen looking for whatever was wrong with her, but the moment they had reached it, the feeling had disappeared again. There was no mark where the pain had been, only smooth, translucent skin.

Pain, she concluded, was something else she could do without, but it wasn't quite all she had felt. There was something else there; faint, almost like an afterimage.

Cold. The word popped into her mind out of nowhere. Was that what it was? If so, she did not like it at all.

Her attention returned to the scene below. More beetles had moved into place, but that was not all that had changed. The ants seemed different too, almost like they were cheering as they were pointing at a large icicle that had pierced the sphere so deep the tip had come out the other side.

Another horn lit up and the first icicle was joined by an almost identical peer. Pain once again had pierced her body, but its bite seemed to have dulled. By the time the third icicle joined the fray, the pain barely registered anymore.

She wasn't so lucky with the cold. Every flash of pain left behind another one of its lingering touches, which were getting more intense as their number increased. Soon enough, mild discomfort had turned into a bone-chilling assault that her body shivering in a desperate battle. A battle she was losing. Even after she had curled up into a ball as tightly as she could, the feeling only kept getting worse.

Until it didn't. It took her a while to catch on to it, but something had changed. It wasn't the ants in their strange gray suits or their beetle companions. They were still cheerfully throwing things at the sphere. It wasn't the ants that had been running away from the sphere either. They seemed to have vanished from sight entirely. Nor was it their surroundings. The town and the hills were still idyllic but bland.

It wasn't until she turned back to the sky that she was rendered speechless. How could she have missed this? It was everywhere! Color. The sky was no longer gray in gray but lit up in a breathtaking gold from horizon to horizon.

She had never seen anything so beautiful before. It was mesmerizing, drawing her in just by looking at it, and without realizing what she was doing, she reached out just like she had tried to before.

This time, she made it. As the tips of her fingers connected with the golden sky, ripples started to fan out, and a new sensation poured into her. The cold that had held her whole body in an iron grip flinched and withdrew only to be replaced by something more desirable than anything she had ever felt.

A commotion from below stopped her from sinking deeper into the sky. She withdrew her hand, immediately regretting the loss of contact, and turned back to the ants below.

Wild chaos seemed to have replaced the orderly dance, just as screams of fear seemed to have replaced cheers of victory. One of the beetles had been cleaved in half, leaving only two smoldering husks and a few blackened pieces of strange gray suits behind. The buildings behind it, all the way out to the hills surrounding the town, were collapsing as they were devoured by golden flames.

The sight made her smile. Adding some color did wonders for the town, and if the golden flames were anything like the golden sky, the ants were bound to love them.

So why did it look like they were running away from them in fear as they poured out of the burning houses? Didn't they like to be… warm? Yes, that was it. She remembered now. Warmth was a good thing. She wanted to be warm, and so should they.

She shrugged. It didn't make any sense to her, but it wasn't like it was any of her business either. She had more important things to do than worry about a few ants that didn't know what was good for them.

She turned back to the sky, reaching out with both hands. Her fingers, once again, made contact allowing glorious warmth to flood her body as she was slowly pulled into the golden membrane.

The deeper she descended into it, the clearer her mind became. The prison of ice and water that had cut her off from the world had evaporated, allowing her to feel panic and fear spreading all around her like a wildfire. The more she shared her warmth with the world though, the more all those bad emotions disappeared.

Soon enough, the town was at peace…

* * *

She was at peace. She was centered. She was calm and in control.

"You sure you don't want one?"

Yang's eye twitched, but she made an effort to keep it closed and maintain her concentration.

"Suit yourself." She could hear her companion take a swig from their hip flask. "With all the fidgeting and whimpering you've been doing, it seems like you could really use a drink though."

With a sigh, she gave up on her exercise and shot her uncle, who was casually leaning back against a nearby tree, a dirty look. "We're supposed to be meditating. Could you at least try to make it look like you're giving it a shot?"

"We? I still don't get how I ended up getting roped into your fancy sitting-around club."

"You offered to help me learn how to stay in control."

Qrow scoffed. "I offered to come visit my niece and drop off the odd care package for her until she gets over herself and stops living like a hermit in the middle of nowhere."

"I'm not—"

He waggled his flask in front of her face, cutting off her protest. "Everything else, my friend here takes care of for me. You might wanna give it a try. Might even be able to stop pretending that 'meditating' is anything but fancy-pants talk for torturing yourself with the ghosts from the past."

Yang took the offered flask and eyed it suspiciously. Her nose wrinkled in disgust as the smell of alcohol emanating from it overpowered her senses. She had never been a fan of hard liquors, not unless they were diluted by enough fruity goodness to give them some real taste, but it wasn't like her "idyllic" mountain retreat offered much beyond crystal-clear lake water in the drinking department.

"Might as well," she said before taking a swig. The burn in her throat was immediate and sent her into a coughing fit.

Once she had gotten over the initial shock, she recovered quickly and glared at her laughing uncle through teary eyes. "What the hell?"

"Not bad, eh?" Qrow asked with a smirk.

"If you're trying to poison me, sure." Yang took a deep breath and rubbed the tears out of her eyes. "Seriously, what is that stuff?"

"Local specialty I pick up every time I pass through Vacuo. Pretty damn hard to get too, so you better don't spill it. They only make the stuff in a handful of villages."

"Yeah, I wonder why," Yang said before giving the flask another sniff. "Do I even want to know what it's made from?"

"Some cactus or another and camel spit."

"Camel spit? As in the frothy liquid stuff that comes out of a giant humped animal's mouth?"

Qrow shrugged. "So goes the tale they tell the tourists. It's not like it comes with a label or anything."

Yang groaned as she fell back onto the grass. She held up the flask, using it to blot out the sun shining down on her. "Desert moonshine made from fermented camel spit. You've officially lost any right to make fun of me for liking drinks that come with tiny umbrellas." She sighed. "I miss those tiny umbrellas…"

"Yeah, well"—Qrow took back his flask and took another swig—"you wouldn't have to miss them if you would just get your scared ass off the ground and moved it back to the real world."

"We talked about this."

"'Not until I'm safe to be around.'" Qrow scoffed. "Convenient excuse that. It's not like either of us will ever be truly safe to be around, so you can just keep running and hiding for as long as you like."

"What would you like me to do?" Yang snapped. "You know how much damage I did the last time was in the 'real world.' You know how many innocent people died because I was too weak—because I lost control." She turned her back to her uncle and stared out into the dense pine forest that covered almost every inch of the remote valley she had made her home. "I can't let that happen again, and I can't put my family in that kind of danger."

"Gee, thanks, kiddo. So, what the hell am I then? Minced meat waiting to be thrown on the grill?"

Yang looked over her shoulder only to be met with an unusually serious expression on her uncle's face. "That's not what I—"

Qrow shook his head, cutting her apology. "You're only fooling yourself if you think that hiding out here is doing anybody any good, including yourself. Have you any idea how devastated your little princess was when she found out that you bit the dust? And that blockheaded brother of yours? He just barely held it together for her sake."

"So what? Even if I could leave here, it's not like Dad or the queen would just let me waltz back into their domain like nothing had happened. Which leaves me where? Sneaking in every couple of months to say hello only to disappear again and never be around when it matters anyway?" A pang of guilt flashed over her uncle's face, but Yang decided to press on no matter how much she had regretted saying it the moment it had left her lips. "Or am I supposed to make my stand and take on the queen and the captain of the royal guard? How many innocent people will that get killed in the crossfire?"

Yang curled in on herself and closed her eyes. "I've been dead to them for a long time now. It's better to keep it that way."

She wasn't in the mood for company or for training anymore, and it seemed like her uncle would accept that. When she heard a heavy sigh and the scraping of metal on metal of Qrow's flask being screwed shut, she thought that he was about to cut his visit short.

"Fine then. Turn into the crazy witch lady from up in the mountains for all I care, but at least fix your goddamn roof before my next visit."

The comment came so far out of left field that Yang forgot all about the funk she had fallen into. "What is wrong with my roof?" she asked as she sat up.

"You're kidding right?" Qrow asked, pointing at the log cabin nestled between the lake and the forest. "It's crooked as hell. How did you even manage to build something so off-kilter? And don't get me started on your walls. Pretty sure most buildings use right angles and keep their walls at the same height."

Yang narrowed her eyes at her uncle. "Well, excuse me for not being a trained carpenter! It doesn't leak, it keeps the wind out, and it hasn't come down on my head yet. That's pretty damn good for building my first ever cabin all by myself in the middle of nowhere, I'd say."

Qrow smirked as he got up from under his tree and walked over to Yang. "That's more like it, kiddo." He ruffled her hair as he sat down next to her. "You just don't feel right without that spark in your eyes."

Yang leaned into the gesture like she was still a little girl. "It's not always a good thing."

"Maybe, but it's who you are. You can't run from that." He shuffled his legs around awkwardly until he ended up in something that vaguely resembled the lotus position and glared at her. "What are you waiting for? Let's try that meditation crap again before I change my mind."

Yang smiled and shook her head as she mirrored her uncle's position, and as her mind started to drift into nothingness, she couldn't help but be grateful that there was at least one person in her family that would always have her back…

* * *

Consciousness was slowly returning to her. The first thing Yang noticed was the pounding in her head. She felt like she had drunk half of her uncle's emergency stash in one go and then some.

She opened her eyes only to be almost blinded by an intense glare. Clamping them shut hard, she tried to bring herself into an upright position, but success was limited. Her limbs seemed to be barely willing to follow her orders, and the slippery floor beneath her did not help the matter at all.

After landing on her face—twice—she took a moment to collect herself and get her bearings. She made sure to keep the bright light out of her field of vision and gave her eyes a chance to adapt. What she found confused her more than anything. She was sprawled out on a perfect mirror of ice in some sort of icy cavern filled with giant pillars of, well, ice. That would explain why she was freezing at least, but not how she had ended up there or why.

The bright light that had almost blinded her turned out to be nothing more than a small oil lantern sitting a few yards away. At least she wouldn't have to find her way out of the bizarre underground forest of ice in the dark.

She tried to get on her feet, but the rustling of metal chains stopped her. She hadn't even noticed them before, but there was no denying that she was shackled to the ground by her limbs.

Yang stared at them in confusion while her mind was trying to catch up with whatever mess she had gotten herself into this time. None of it made any sense to her.

She didn't want to wait around for whoever had put the chains on her in the first place, but trying to remove the heavy metal cuffs that were keeping her trapped was easier said than done. There was no easy way to unlock them—they were secured by heavy-duty padlocks—and while she had some wriggle room, there was no way she would be able to slip out of them either.

Frustrated, she forced herself up on unsteady legs and stretched the chains as far as she could only to be stopped after a mere two yards or so from where they had been driven into the ground. That wouldn't do her much good if she were to try and take down her captors while still chained, so she resorted to one of her favorite tools of problem-solving: brute force.

She wrapped one of the chains around her arm to get a better grip, put it under tension, and got ready to throw all her weight and strength into it. As long as she would be free to move, she didn't really care if she pulled the anchor out of the ground or snapped the chain in half. She did neither. The only thing that was almost snapped in half was her arm as the chain links tightened around it, crushing it in the process.

With a yelp of pain, she let go of the chain and allowed it to slip from her arm. No! This could be not be happening. Not again! She had assumed that she was cold simply because she had been stuck in a cave made of ice for too long while unconscious, but now that she actually paid attention to it, she realized that she couldn't feel her aura, at all. There wasn't a hint of it to be found no matter how much she tried to draw it out.

She stared at her hands in disbelief. After all the training, after all the hard work and the loneliness she had endured, she should not have failed to stay in control, not again. She had worked too hard to end up like this again! But it all added up. Her groggy mind, the holes in her memory, her aura taking a vacation; while the effects may vary in detail, the pattern always seemed to be the same. She had screwed up again…

Before Yang could rack her brain further trying to figure out what exactly had happened, she noticed footsteps approaching her and moved as far to the back as she could in hopes that her captors might underestimate her range and give her an opening.

Whatever she might have done, her first order of business was to get away from people. She needed to disappear somewhere in the wild where nobody would come looking for her until all the pieces of her scattered mind had fallen back into place. Once she would remember what had happened, she could try again to find a way to keep herself from causing harm to everyone around her.

A tall figure with their back held so impossibly and uncomfortably straight that they could only have been a military man rounded one of the icy columns that surrounded Yang. The heavy winter outfit would have rendered them unrecognizable if it hadn't been for their eyes and their voice.

It all came back to her. The loneliness of her mountain hideout becoming unbearable. Her trips to some remote frontier settlements to keep herself from going insane. Falling for the lure of civilization and being drawn back into the world. The ambush led by her own father who brought a small army down on her. Her capture, and then… nothing.

"I see you're finally awake," the captain of Vale's royal guard said after he had pulled the woolen mask from his face. "I was wondering if that new concoction the doctors had mixed up had knocked you out for good this time. No such luck, I suppose."

"Dad? What is going on?" Yang asked in a timid voice that made her hate how, after everything that had happened between them, having to face that man could still reduce her to a little girl worrying about getting scolded, or worse, grounded.

Her father scoffed. "Don't tell me you've forgotten already. For once in your life you decided to do as you were told and bowed your head to the authority of the Crown of Vale."

She had! She hadn't lost control. It hadn't been her fault—not this time—but she had still screwed up.

"You took an entire town hostage to force my hand! Is that how the Crown of Vale should treat its people? And for what? I wasn't even going to come back to your city."

"You would have eventually, for one reason or another. You always liked to cause trouble, and letting you roam free was too much of a risk to take."

Yang swallowed her anger and force herself to stay calm. Her father being her captor didn't change a thing. She had to bide her time and wait for the moment he stepped too close.

"So, what now?" she asked. "You lock me up in another prison? Your lab with all its fancy equipment and drugs could only hold me for so long. How will a bit of ice and a few chains be any different?"

He laughed. The arrogant bastard actually had the nerve to laugh at her!

"Well, even if I wanted to tell you, I couldn't. A lot of very smart people have put a lot of effort into building this place, most of which went right over my head." He took a few steps forward but remained out of reach. "The chains and the ice aren't your cage."

The light of her father's torch drew Yang's attention to strange markings on the floor. Some sort of glyphs, red on white with black tendrils reaching out into their surroundings.

"This is. And quite an impressive one too. I've seen it stop a rampaging ursa major dead in its tracks. I know, that probably wouldn't be enough to hold you. If you had your aura, that is."

Yang balled her fists. His smugness did not bode well for her, but she couldn't afford to blow her chance at an escape by letting her temper get the better of her.

"Don't bother," her father said. "I might not be able to test the strength of that barrier, but I'm subject to everything else here just like you. It's not just the sedatives you're recovering from that leave you without your aura. This cage is quite ingenious in that regard. It fuels itself through that abominable soul of yours that seems to be keeping you alive no matter what.

"Without your aura, you will go nowhere, but as long as you go nowhere, you will be without your aura. Quite the conundrum."

"No, that's not possible," Yang said in disbelief. "There is no way to siphon off auras and reuse them."

"That's what I said, but it seems to be working, and it's not like we could ask the architects of your cage about the details, not anymore."

Yang glared at her father, knowing the answer to her question without having to ask it. "You killed them."

"They died in the service of their kingdom on an expedition into the wilderness beyond our borders like so many other brave men and women before them." He scoffed. "Even in surrender, people still die because of you."

"Me? You made them do your dirty work and killed them for it! Don't you dare blame the blood on your hands on me!"

"Why wouldn't I?" her father asked. "How many people would still be alive if you had just died like you were supposed to the first time around? Or the second? Or the third? Every single time you survived, people died. That is on you! But with this last sacrifice, the world will finally be free of you."

He turned his back on Yang and lowered his voice. "The people that had been gathered for this assignment were some of the most brilliant minds Vale had ever seen. They could have achieved great things for our kingdom. They could have saved and improved countless lives. Instead, all that potential was lost because of you."

Yang stared at her father's back, baffled. "That's insane!"

"No, it was necessary. There cannot be any loose ends leading to this, your tomb. Not even the queen knows of its location, and by the time I'm done, the world will have all but forgotten about you. Nobody will ever find you again."

He turned to look her in the eye. "The blood of the Xiao Long will live on in the royal family of Vale through my eldest son and _only_ child."

"Dad?" Yang asked with her eyes wide. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. Sure, they had hated each other for years, they had even tried to kill each other on several occasions, but unlike her mother, her father, at least, had never denied that they were family no matter how bad things had gotten between them.

"I may have taken in a stray a long time ago who gave her life in the line of duty as was expected of her, but I have no daughter."

"Dad, you can't be serious!"

He squared his shoulders and uttered what would be the last words he would ever say to her: "Never call me that again."

By the time Yang snapped out of her stupor, he had already vanished into the forest of ice. She raged, pleaded, cursed, and begged, but there was no more reply.

Eventually, her tomb fell quiet, and as the last flickers of a lone oil lamp died out, darkness, hunger, and the freezing cold became her only companions.

As promised, the world had quickly forgotten about her, and nobody would ever find her again. That was, until…

* * *

 **Author's Note**

And that's it. Yeah, I know. Another cliffhanger, but in my defense, _Yellow_ was always supposed to lead directly into the final scene of _Black._ There was one more scene planned at the end (the whole eye-contact thing from Yang's perspective) but this story had too many Yang-wakes-up-and-is-confused-as-hell scenes already, so I went with a bit more of a narrator-style ending.

As for the story itself, I'm torn about it, to be honest. It was, in many ways, an experiment that didn't work out the way it was supposed to. I tried too many new things without sticking to any of them, which left the end result feel all over the place in many ways.

Given that Yang has been somewhat stuck for the better part of two decades—including the entirety of _Black_ —the idea was to use a selection of moments from Yang's past presented as memories that are played in a loop by Yang's compromised and bored mind. The loneliness, the darkness, the hunger, the cold; it was all supposed to bleed through and change how Yang remembers things.

That didn't work out. The theme of her being cold and wanting to be warm again stayed relevant in which scenes I would select but not in how I would present them. Eventually, the story turned into a regular fast forward over Yang's backstory via snippets of her past.

That seemed a bit boring though, so I went ahead and tried a new style of using scene breaks. Rather than cutting on logical breaks, I tried to cut on more abstract breaks (shared emotions, repeated actions, and so on) even if they were to happen in the middle of a scene. Unfortunately, I never manage to keep to my outlines, and the cuts I had planned don't line up all that well anymore in the final product. Technically all still have a theme, but for some of them, one has to squint really, really hard.

Ultimately, all that pretentious nonsense doesn't matter. For the most part, I think the end result is passable, though, there are a few things—mostly revolving around the out-of-body-experience, that far too long monologue of Yang's in the maze, and the fact that the scenes I ended up selecting are pretty repetitive—that could have been done a lot better. On the other hand, the parts that I really like are the talky bits with slice of life and humor (Yang and Summer, Yang and Jack, Yang and Qrow). Basically, the stuff I usually do.

Oh, well. I hope that the story makes sense the way it is presented at least. It does to me, but then, I know all the bits that happen in between the scenes, which tends to be quite a lot as, with the exception of the first two scenes, every scene break actually skips ahead by several weeks to months.

Yang's backstory is probably expansive enough to be its own prequel novel, which I'm not going to actually write. It wouldn't have any Blake/Yang interaction (Blake would have been a toddler at the time), which is what brings me to the _RWBY_ fandom in the first place, and it still has quite a few holes that would need to be stuffed if it was to become anything more than a backstory in a character bio.

Take the queen and Yang's father for example. They are very one-dimensional placeholders used to fill in the villain slots I needed to push Yang in a certain direction. They aren't actually fleshed out characters, although, Yang's father, over the course of writing _Yellow,_ has turned from an arbitrarily nasty guy into an overly loyal follower that chose the queen over his own family. And with Yang considering doing away with the queen for Summer's sake, there's actually a bit of symmetry there.

Summer is also quite underdeveloped. She's basically just Ruby with a bit of a different backstory and a slightly more developed girlish side. It works, but it also feels a bit lazy to me. I'll need to tinker quite a bit with her adult version to give her a more distinct personality before her debut in the main story.

Which reminds me: _Yellow_ also shows off some of the changes _RWBYFam_ made to the family trees. As mentioned before, Yang was moved up by a generation, leaving her as Taiyang's older half-sister despite their names' literal meanings (there's actually a reason for that not that it matters much) and Ruby's aunt.

Yang's father is _not_ Taiyang, mostly because he was always supposed to be a throwaway bad guy that wouldn't exactly make it into the main story. Taiyang would have been severely out of character and completely wasted in that role, which is not something I wanted to do to an established character. Her mother, however, is still Raven, and Qrow is still her uncle, so they have been moved up a generation (or more, who knows…) as well.

Speaking of established characters, I'm thinking of turning the spear lady that hurts Yang into that White Fang boss lady from the fifth volume. The injury that changed Yang's life could have been caused by a proto-White Fang, which would give me an interesting link between Blake and Yang's respective pasts, and could also explain how Adam might have found out about the rumored "artifact" in the first place.

We also see some of the influence _Valkyria Chronicles_ had on this setting. We have Yang's "awakening" after being seriously wounded, which mirrors Alicia's awakening, and the out-of-body-experience scene is, in essence, a valkyria going on a rampage (even though she doesn't realize it at the time) and doing a Selvaria at the end. Unlike Selvaria though, Yang has the phoenix theme going for her, which saved her ass. (Several times, in fact.)

And no, there is no such thing as a valkyria in this setting. While Yang is something weird, it is all linked to _RWBY_ mythology. The setting is not actually a crossover with _Valkyria Chronicles._ I'm just using it as an inspiration for certain things.

Yang's backstory also turned out unexpectedly dark. It is not indicative of the stories I'm trying to write, including _RWBYFam._ Or so I'd like to say. _Black_ also wasn't exactly my casual sitting-around-and-having-a-chat-in-a-rose-colored-world kind of story, so who knows. I'm certainly not aiming for it, but should it turn out on the darker side of _my_ spectrum (which would still be rather light in the grand scheme of things) then so be it, I suppose.

I also realized that I have no idea if I should use kid or kiddo in Qrow's speech patterns. I'm pretty sure he used one of them with Ruby, just not which. And, of course, with Yang being estranged from her own father, she's taking more after her uncle, which is why she is sounding a little bit like Qrow when she's talking to Summer. (Actually, I'm kind of doing that in _RWBYNov_ too. It might just be a quirk of my interpretation of Yang in general.)

So, yeah. That's about it for now. I'm probably going to take a bit of a break from _RWBYFam_ in order to work on some other showcases (and _RWBYNov_ ), but there is at least one more short story I'd like to write for this showcase in the somewhat near future, which would revolve around Yang and Ruby's first meeting.

Yes, I know. Some people asked for Blake and Yang's first meeting (beyond the whole staring-at-each-other thing), and I do want to write that, but it's quite involved with Yang's recovery, and that is more of a full story arc kind of deal.

Anyhoo, this was an interesting experiment, but also a very tedious one with a so-so result. It's probably not something I'm going to repeat anytime soon, so expect my next release, whatever it might be, to return to something more akin to my usual style and subject matter.

Now, as always, please let me know what you think, and feel free to drop by on Twitter (twitter{.}com/sittschowrites) for news and further information on this and other stories in the works.

That is all.


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